The killing of holders of high office for a political or ideological purpose is a practice as old as power politics itself. Assassins tells the darkly sensational story of twenty centuries of political murder, from Ancient Rome to the present. It includes accounts of the most infamous assassinations in history, from the slaying of Julius Caesar in 44 BC to the shooting of President Kennedy in 1963; from the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 to the terrorist attack on Benazir Bhutto in 2007.As the stories in this book reveal, assassination is the ultimate method of regime change; it has overthrown governments, plunged countries into chaos, ignited wars and subjected entire populations to tyranny. The capacity of political murder to change history has rendered it fertile ground for counter-factual speculation: what if Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car had not lost its way in the back streets of Sarajevo and he had managed to evade his assassin? What if John F. Kennedy had survived? What if his brother Robert had not died at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan, but had gone on to become US President?Assassins runs the full gamut of murderous methods and motivations - from multiple stabbing to suicide bombing to aerial attack, from dynastic overthrow to religious fanaticism to the "propaganda of the deed". Sometimes shocking, but always involving and informative, it offers a dramatic and distinctive perspective on more than two millennia of world history.