Peter Taylor examines four landmark terrorist acts of the past three decades, and their effect on history, politics and psychology. In the first programme, the story of the 1976 hijacking of a plane by Palestinians allied with German Marxist revolutionaries, which ended with a daring Israeli raid on Entebbe airport in Idi Amin's Uganda.

Peter Taylor recalls the capture in French waters of a shipment of Libyan arms en route to massively augment the IRA's secret arsenal, and the paramilitary group's attack on a Remembrance ceremony in Enniskillen that followed less than a fortnight later, in which the quiet border town became the epicentre of the Troubles. Both events, in 1987, served to transform the political climate in Ulster

Peter Taylor looks back to Christmas Eve 1994, when a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked a French airliner in Algiers and murdered three hostages before intelligence revealed they were planning to fly into a Parisian landmark. The chilling precursor to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was prevented when French forces stormed the plane, killing the criminals and freeing all remaining passengers

Peter Taylor's history of modern terrorism concludes by exploring the lead up to 9/11 with the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa.