The study of assassination is akin to running a razor blade down the history of international politics: the cut is narrow but long and deep. Assassination reveals statesmen and their servants at their most authentically vulnerable moments – they are, after all, often the people with the most to lose. Assassination: personal, violent, widely reported, strips back layers of self-deception like few other acts.My own study of assassination started, as historical research should, with curiosity occasioned by a different project. I was researching the attempts by Britain to limit the international trade in small arms from the Edwardian period to the twenty-first century when I came across this statement: semi-automatic pistols were ‘devilish weapons’ because ‘any fool can shoot a Viceroy or a police inspector.’ I wondered if they could, and thus the trail started winding through many hundreds of assassinations.