We Love Death as You Love Life by Raffaello Pantucci

"Eh up, you unbelieving kuffar bastards," says the character Waj, in a broad Yorkshire accent, in the opening scene of Four Lions , a dark, satirical movie masterpiece on British jihadism.

Waj is recording his martyrdom video. Unable to secure a real assault rifle, he is holding a "proper" toy one. He has to move closer to the camera to "bigger it". But that means viewers cannot see that he is a terrorist.

Four Lions was released in 2010, five years after the London bombings of 2005. In the history of UK Islamic extremism and terror, truth and surreality are close bedfellows. So much is clear from Raffaello Pantucci's survey of the subject, We Love Death as You Love Life - the most articulate and carefully researched account of Britain's "suburban terrorists" to date.

Pantucci, a researcher of domestic terror, and international director at the Royal United Services Institute, covers a sweeping, underexplored arc of British cultural history, from early waves of migration from the 1950s to 1970s to the flourishing of extremist movements across the UK and the terrorist cells they have spawned. Every significant terror plot of the past two decades is covered.

It is easy to see where Four Lions found real-life inspiration: from Birmingham boys in the Taliban with tattoos of local football team Aston Villa to the blundering plotters whose plans included attaching blades to the side of their cars and driving them around crowded places.

Such instances can appear farcical in isolation but this is a sobering book. The British public may be suffering terror fatigue. Yet, as Pantucci notes, quoting Jonathan Evans, former MI5 director-general, we are "setting ourselves up for a nasty disappointment" if we think it has gone away.

As the 10-year anniversary of the London bombings approaches, British jihadism is again in the spotlight. And frightening reality again seems to have the upper hand over satire. Indeed, We Love Death could not be more timely.

The title is taken from one of the more lucid utterings of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora in the late 1990s, a phrase that has echoed down the history of those who would murder in the name of Islam. London's 2005 Tube bombers evoked it: Mohammad Sidique Khan, the plot's mastermind, used it in his own martyrdom video, filmed before he blew himself up between Edgware Road and Paddington stations, killing five and maiming many others.

London teenager Brusthom Ziamani evoked it too. Earlier this year he was sent to prison for 22 years after being seized with a 12in knife and a hammer in his backpack. His farewell note to his parents read: "We love to die the way you love to live."

Amid the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the descent of the Middle East into chaos, the threat of attacks on British soil is as high as it has ever been. At least three big plots have been foiled in the UK in the past few months alone. If there is a drawback to Pantucci's book, it is that it stops just short of looking at the latest dramatic turn in British jihadism. We Love Death, as the author notes at the outset, is a backward-looking work, the fulcrum of which is 2005, not 2015.

Which is not to say it is irrelevant today. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the account, it is perhaps that terrorism does not happen in a vacuum but is incubated in a broader culture of extremism. For many years, the British government tolerated a burgeoning extremist culture at home, with the influence of organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, al-Muhajiroun or Tablighi Jamaat left almost totally unchecked in the belief that the focus of radicals' attentions lay overseas.

Such networks still exist in Britain, albeit in different forms. The government still has no thorough strategy for tackling them. But now there is also an added layer: a vast pool of extremist material readily accessible online and rendered emotionally and psychologically compelling through social media. Dealing with this phenomenon, while preserving liberties, will be one of the defining problems of national security in the decade to come.

The first wave of British jihadism may have broken, Pantucci concludes. "But the undercurrents of a new storm surge are building."

The writer is the FT's defence and security editor

We Love Death as You Love Life: Britain's Suburban Terrorists by Raffaello Pantucci, C Hurst (£15.99)

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