What is a narrative? According to the US Armed Forces 2009 publication Counterinsurgency Operations, it’s “a story recounted in the form of a linked set of events that explains an event in a group’s history and expresses the values, character, or identity of the group.” The May 2006 government-authored report on the 7/7 London bombings is certainly shaped as a chain of events. It tells a chronological story which moves from the morning of the bombings to the immediate aftermath. The report also articulates a version of British identity when it suggests that the four men who planted the bombs might have been trained by an Al Qaida terror cell in Pakistan, so implying that terrorism is a foreign rather than a domestic problem. Yet given that the terrorists were all Yorkshiremen, how far do the report’s authors underestimate a homegrown dissident tendency? What does it even mean to be British in the context of globalisation? The official narrative of the 7/7 London bombings answers questions about the “who”, “what” and “where” of events even as it raises deeper questions about the “how” and the “why”. See http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc0506/hc10/1087/1087.asp