All posts tagged: violence

Pieter Spierenburg on Violence and Punishment

Published by podmeister

“Pieter Spierenburg is one of the world’s experts on the history of violent crime, and his writings are filled with fascinating facts and thought-provoking insights.” Steven Pinker, Harvard University Pieter Spierenburg is professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. In 2008 Polity published his History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, and in autumn 2012 they published a collection of his essays entitled Violence and Punishment: Civilizing the Body through Time. The book looks not only looks at broad trends in crime and punishment since the middle ages, but also attempts to explain the reduction in incidences of violent crime and in the severity of punishments. Spierenburg – who was taught by Norbert Elias and whose work is influenced by his – also looks at the interrelationship between gender, honour and the body, which he situates within his broad analysis of the civilizing process. The angle of the lens widens still further in the final chapters, which tackle corollary developments to the decline of violence, such as …

Did the Vikings wear Viking helmets?

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Robert Ferguson visited London from his home in Oslo earlier this week and I interviewed him at his publisher’s offices for the Blackwells podcast which will go out tomorrow. Robert has just published a major new history of the Viking age called The Hammer and the Cross, in which he says he wants to “restore the violence of the Viking age”, but also to explain the context in which that violence took place – namely the enforced Christianization of the northern peoples by Charlemagne. Is it, Robert wonders in the Blackwells interview, out of place to compare the dynamic driving those Viking raids to modern acts of terrorism? I also made this short film with him in which I confess the questions were a bit more straightforward: so did the Vikings wear horned helmets? Click below to find out [3:37].

Auster and Aslam

Published by podmeister

The latest podcast I’ve produced for Faber has just gone up on their site. In it I talk to novelists Paul Auster and Nadeem Aslam about the books they published this autumn. You can find the podcast here. In Auster’s book, Man in the Dark, an ageing literary critic, August Brill, spends a night imagining a dystopian future in which America is embroiled in a civil war as a way of distracting him from the ghosts that trouble his sleep, not least of which is the death of his granddaughter’s boyfriend in Iraq.