This chapter offers an account of the key events shaping modern forensic psychiatry since the 1950s, including legal reforms, political initiatives and key reports which have influenced practice. These are summarised in a narrative beginning with the 1959 Mental Health Act and concluding with the most recent Wessely proposals for reform. The critical clinical events including the cases of Graham Young, Peter Sutcliffe, Christopher Clunis and Michael Stone, the Carstairs escapes and the Butler, Reed, Blom-Cooper, Fallon and Tilt reports are discussed. The chapter includes a commentary on the development of medium-secure services and the refocussing of high-secure care since 2000.

Liddell Hart’s Foreword to Samuel Griffith’s 1963 translation of Sunzi is the locus classicus for the interpretation that Sunzi advocated an “indirect approach” to strategy. Liddell Hart asserted that Sunzi was the world’s greatest military thinker, with only Clausewitz comparable, if dated, and that much of the suffering caused by World War I and World War II would have been avoided if planners had absorbed some of Sunzi’s “realism and moderation” to balance Clausewitz’s theoretical emphasis on “‘total war’ beyond all bounds of sense.” Although Sunzi appeared in Europe with a French translation in the late eighteenth century, and appealed to the “rational trend of eighteenth-century thinking about war,” it was not influential because of “the emotional surge of the Revolution.” A new and complete translation was needed, particularly with the appearance of nuclear weapons, and with China becoming a great power under Mao Zedong.

Revenge probably features in most, if not all, lust killing. This chapter exemplifies where revenge for perceived transgression comes into the clearest focus and seems to occupy center stage. Of course, the revenge was disproportionate to the ‘offence’, a feature of displaced aggression and ‘revenge collecting’. Part of the trigger to revenge is a blow to self-esteem. The antagonism that Peter Sutcliffe felt towards women appeared to derive from suspicions over his partner’s infidelity and being cheated by a sex worker. Sutcliffe seemed to have a kind of love-hate relationship with sex workers. He was fascinated by them and engaged them in sex but was alsodisgusted by them and killed them. It can be speculated that Levi Bellfield’s toxic trajectory started when as a boy he was jilted by a blond girl. Most of his victims were blond girls, yet he sought this type as his girlfriends. Sergey Golovkin targeted boys.