War and Unpeace

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE

I
n the eventful years between 1822 and 1922, nearly 1 million British subjects died in war, but not a single member of Parliament died in a political assassination. After the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson by Irish republicans in 1922, there passed more than a half century before the next assassination of an MP: the murder of Airey Neave, also by Irish republicans, in 1979. Those were bloody years, too — nearly a half-million British dead in World War II, more than 1,000 dead in Korea, 1,200 in Indonesia, hundreds in Palestine and Malaya, and more in other, smaller conflicts.

With …