Granta is a British literary magazine, published quarterly. It calls itself ‘the magazine of new writing’ on a range of topics, and has been the first to publish many later well-known writers.
Granta 103, The Rise of British Jihad, has as usual several interesting pieces of writing and several to take or leave. The cover story, by BBC journalist Richard Watson, is well worth reading (there’s an extract here). He investigates the series of events, failures, poor decisions and mistakes that allowed Britain’s indigenous terrorists to grow and develop. Going back to the first Balkan war, Watson explores how young Muslim men in Britain became inspired to take part in jihad, ultimately leading to the London tube and bus bombings in 2005. He also probes how MI5 made a pragmatic but ultimately fatal choice to ignore terrorist organisations to use the UK as a base so long as they were focused on targets elsewhere. Watson’s piece is neutral and balanced – he makes no calls for heads on platters, but just allows the facts to tell the story. There is a video interview with Watson here.
