Edward Fox in the film version of The Day of the Jackal

GOOD King Wenceslaus looked out, the carol states, on the Feast of Stephen.

For the noble name-checked in the song, taking up an invitation to a Saints Day banquet from his brother did not end well. The Bohemian noble was brutally assassinated, hacked to pieces by his sibling’s henchmen after dinner.

Wenceslaus’s story, along with more than 300 others, are retold by author John Withington in a comprehensive, chronological history of this particular form of murder.

Assassins’ Deeds: A History of Assassination From Ancient Egypt To The present Day tells us Wenceslaus was the victim of religious conflict between himself, his grandmother, his sister-in-law and brother. It was not a happy family: his grandmother, Ludmilla, was strangled by two Viking killers paid for by his daughter-in-law, Drahorima. Wenceslaus took power, and the exiled Drahorima persuaded her other son, Boleslav, to do away with the Good King.

Contemporary accounts describe a grisly end: after stabbing him repeatedly, they cut his body into small bits.
Such tales abound as John’s takes the reader through 4,000 years of intrigue-motivated murder.

John says that while “all assassinations may be murder, the converse is not true”.

He cites the Cambridge dictionary as describing it as “a planned attack, typically with a political or ideological motive, sometimes carried out by a hired or professional killer,” and he uses that as the criterion for inclusion.

Wenceslaus flees from his brother who is wielding a sword, but the priest closes the door of the church

John’s background is in TV and radio journalism. One series he made became the basis of Shutdown: Anatomy of a Shipyard, a book featuring the story of a north east England community who saw their main form of employment disappear. He followed the story to see what happened to those who had lost their jobs.

Other books followed, focusing on disasters – both of humans’ making and in the natural world.

John considers assassins’ motivation, method, effect and context, dating from the first account he could find – the killing of Egyptian Pharaoh Teti by his body guards in 4,800 BC – to the present day.

“It flowed naturally from writing about disasters,” he says.

“The idea came to me when I heard about the bizarre assassination of Kim Jong-Nam, [the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il murdered by a nerve agent in a Malaysian airport]. It made me think back to JFK’s assassination, and like everyone of my generation, I could remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. The same applies with John Lennon’s murder. I have vivid memories of the killings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King – these stories plainly have resonance.”

The book covers more than 260 such deeds.

“Plainly all were successful in the sense that the victim was killed, but I tried to evaluate whether the assassin would have been satisfied with the outcome of their deed,” he adds.

“This is obviously subjective, but I came to the conclusion that in 132 cases, they probably would have been, whereas in 83 they would not. In the other cases, I felt I did not have enough information to decide.”

And sifting through our species’ bloody history gave John plenty of scope.

“There are a number of celebrated assassinations it would be perverse to exclude – Julius Caesar, Thomas Becket, Abraham Lincoln, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand,” he says.

“But I wanted more than just a list of important assassinations, so I tried to analyse how assassination had changed over the centuries – in motive and method, for example.”

Everything from stones, swords and daggers, strangulation, poison, bombs and bullets are considered.

“If you think about who is the most famous assassin in fiction, you could make a good case for the Jackal, in Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal,” he says.

“Think of his characteristics. The killing was strictly business – he was doing it because someone was paying him a lot of money. It was meticulously planned – and the Jackal chose to use a sniper’s rifle. I found this was very untypical. Of the 266 assassinations, only 18 were done by hired killers. Far from planning meticulously, the assassins sometimes had to kill second-choice victims because the preferred target hadn’t turned up. This happened with the only British prime minister to be assassinated, Spencer Perceval in 1812.”

When guns took over from knives in the 19th century, they still would be generally discharged from a close distance to the victim.

“Of the 266 assassinations, only 19 were not at close quarters – and maybe this is why,” he says.

“Ace sniper though he was, the Jackal missed. His target, President de Gaulle, bent his head at the crucial moment.”

This scenario at the climax of Forsyth’s book actually happened to George III, as John points out: “Someone took a pot shot at him in the theatre, but he bowed to acknowledge the applause of the crowd and the bullet missed.”

• Assassins’ Deeds: A History of Assassination from Ancient egypt to the Present Day. By John Withington. Reaktion Books, £18