Simon Ball has been the University’s Chair of International History & Politics at the University of Leeds since 2012. He previously served as Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Glasgow. As Academic Integrity Lead in the School of History, his research centers on the Cold War, the Second World War, British politics, assassination in international politics, and twentieth-century secret intelligence. Professor Ball edited War in History and sits on the editorial boards of Intelligence & National Security and Diplomacy & Statecraft. His books include Death To Order (2025), Secret History (2020), Alamein (2016; Folio Society 2022), The Bitter Sea (2009), The Guardsmen (2004), The Cold War (1998; reprinted 2009), and The Bomber in British Strategy (1995; Routledge 2022). He collaborates widely beyond academia, including authoring a 2022 REF Impact Case Study.
Death to Order is an analytical history of assassination between 1914 and 2024, one-hundred-and-ten years.Death to Order sets out to convince the reader, with a mass of archival evidence drawn from around the world, that modern assassination (i.e., since 1914) has been, and is, fundamentally a phenomenon related to states. That is not to say that states were always behind assassination – although they sometimes were – but rather that the reaction of states, and particularly great powers, to assassination has given modern political murder its potent charge.Secondly, Death to Order shows that the changes assassination wrought in democracies were subtle but identifiable in the archives. One must always acknowledge that available evidence on assassination is both complex and fractured and needs to be unravelled with care; however, this can be done by the application of proper historical research.
Simon Ball Death to Order:A Modern History of Assassination Yale University Press 464 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN 9780300258042
We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!