 Several critics have called The Good Terrorist 's title an oxymoron . Robert <unk> suggested it is indicative of Alice 's " contradictory personality " , that she <unk> the squat 's house , yet is bent on destroying society . In The Hudson Review , George <unk> wrote that the title " hovers above the novel with ... irony " . The reader assumes that Alice is the " good terrorist " , but that while she may be a good person , she is " rotten at being a terrorist " . Writing in World Literature Today , Mona Knapp concluded that Lessing 's heroine , the " good terrorist " , is neither a good person , nor a good revolutionary . She knows how to renovate houses and manipulate people to her advantage , but she is unemployed and steals money from her parents . When real revolutionaries start using the squat to ship arms , she <unk> , and going behind her comrades ' backs , she makes a telephone call to the authorities to warn them . Knapp called Alice " a bad terrorist and a stunted human being " . <unk> suggested that it is Lessing herself who is the " good terrorist " , <unk> here by Alice , but that hers is " political terrorism of a literary kind " , where she frequently disguises her ideas in " very domestic @-@ looking fiction " , and " direct [ ly ] challenge [ s ] ... our sense of reality " . 
