The best thing ever written on terrorism wasn't by Conrad or Bobbitt but popped up on Not the Nine O'Clock News. The team played earnest young radicals poring over a copy of Das Kapital. One of them looked up and began reading out a particularly tedious passage. He paused, turned to his comrades and uttered words to the effect of: “Sod this for a game of soldiers, let's just go and bomb something...” Caught in 60 seconds were all the meretriciousness, the moral squalor, the lust for violence, intellectual snobbery and intellectual poverty behind most terrorist acts. All that, plus a great punchline and a powerful reminder of the stale flatulence of Marxist prose.

Das Kapital is one of those works, like J.M.Keynes's General Theory, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Lisbon treaty, Ulysses and Moby Dick that manage to be hugely influential without it being possible to find anyone who has actually read them.

This week, in the context of terrorism, we're likely to hear a lot about another text few actually trouble to read right through - Magna Carta. It's one of those documents whose meaning has seeped, osmotically, into the national conscience. It's no longer just an historical document: it's Holy Writ, the revealed truth for any Good Liberal. Mind you, some of those responsible for consecrating the document are hardly liberal heroes. It was Rudyard Kipling who wrote the hymn to Magna Carta: “You musn't sell, delay, deny,/ A freeman's right or liberty./ It wakes the stubborn Englishry,/ We saw 'em roused at Runnymede!”

Ironic as it may be that the author of The White Man's Burden worships in the congregation of the Magna Carta faithful, it's interesting to note those writers who have declined to bow the knee. There are a number of authors who have renounced the barons and all their works - the Runnymede refuseniks. For them the standard version of the Island story - over generations the British people wrest their rights from a jealous central authority - has been plain wrong. Instead, these writers see the barons who have revolted against the king, the men behind Magna Carta and every other English revolution, as just another group of self-interested magnates who undermined the bond between monarch and people for their selfish interests. The same thing happened during the Civil War when the Parliamentarian side was just a conspiracy of nobles to protect their own, and the Glorious Revolution was another coup d'état by the wealthy against the interests of the people.

This view, which sees in the monarchy a source of benign, and necessary, authority, unpolluted by ambition and above the petty politicking of parliaments, was shared, in different ways, by Hobbes and Bolingbroke, Dryden and Pope. It was also the view held by Hilaire Belloc and Sir Charles Petrie, two of the best-read historians of the early 20th century. It's an analysis now reinforced by two of our best contemporary historians, Kevin Sharpe and John Adamson, in The Personal Rule of Charles I and The Noble Revolt. But it's a perspective shared by precious few now.

It's come to something when the subversive view of British history is now to be on the side of authority. But then, given how those who wield authority are behaving, perhaps that's for the best...

Like father, like son

The conflict between those who believe in the protective gauntlet of righteous authority and the raised fist of the freedom-loving rebel is one of the (about 873) themes in Nick Harkaway's exuberant new novel The Gone-Away World. Harkaway's book has had more than its strictly fair share of publicity because he's John le Carré's son.

Critics have goggled at the apparently massive difference between Harkaway's wildly inventive post-apocalyptic sci-fi and le Carré's measured unfolding of Cold War treacheries. But both

writers are actually uncannily similar in their preoccupations. Both empathise with the exploited of the developing world, hate imperialism, try to mock global capitalism and enjoy springing late-plot surprises.

As Neil Powell's new book on Kingsley and Martin Amis reminds us, it's usually those writers who start out as lefty iconoclasts who end up affirming the hereditary principle.

Clarkson in top gear

One of the (inexpressibly enjoyable) treats of my week was meeting Jeremy Clarkson. He speaks as he writes, And he writes as he broadcasts.

For someone so in love with machinery he's as close to a force of nature as anyone I've ever met - unspun, unself-conscious, uninhibited and grippingly charismatic.

He also has a dark secret that will shock all those fans (myself included) who thrill to his raw antipathy towards political correctness. His (elegantly expressed) views on foreign policy are a lot closer to George Monbiot and John le Carré's than they are to mine. I wonder if his dad was in the Foreign Office...

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