A basilisk glance

Poison – invisible, unknown, hard to detect and deadly – taps into hard-wired anxieties about the risks of the world around us. From ancient times to the modern age, it has always created more fear than any other threats. In this book, Robert Templer takes us through the dark maze of poison. He traces its path from when Hercules dipped his arrows in the blood from the severed head of the Hydra to the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War in 1980s, from the death of Socrates to the use of toxins as a weapon of assassination, from the mass suicide of Jonestown in 1979 to the sarin attack in the Tokyo metro system.