Events before the murderous attacks in Paris suddenly looked very different in retrospect. Not long before the atrocities, The Times reported that a Tunisian terrorist who recruited suicide bombers had been arrested by the Italian police after posing as an asylum seeker on a migrant boat. “Concerns about terrorists arriving in Italy are high before a Holy Year, starting next month, during which millions of Catholic pilgrims will visit Rome,” wrote Tom Kington. At the time I thought that a pretty far-fetched anxiety.By chance, too, The Daily Telegraph had mentioned in its obituary of the French anthropologist René Girard that the status of Islamist terrorism was, in his view, “mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale”. This was all about Girard’s shifting t