Terrific tv drama shown on BBC Jan. 4th-6th 2012, starring Anna Friel and Daniel Mays. Daniel Mays is compelling as a murderer released on life licence after serving 10 years who is tightly regulated, monitored and harassed even by his probation officer, a young woman, played by Anna Friel, who is still shocked at the reaction to her last client killing on licence. Harry Fletcher, Asst. Gen. Sec. of NAPO was consulted on the script so it probably sums up the tensions between public protection and rehabilitation, in a context of ever-growing paperwork, which make today's probation work so much less rewarding no doubt than its previous incarnations. As in academia, the point of the exercise is being lost in a sea of public accountability, anally retentive paperwork and the conversion of the service into a punishment or form of regulation. See our Press Cutting on the realism of the script and the tweets, here and elsewhere, aound that time.

See also this comment on the programme by Staffordshire and West Midlands Probation Trust.

Feb 3rd: I should add that this was written before the dreadful turn in the narrative in the third and final part, following which I asked my old friend Mike Nellis, who has written some major stuff on probation, what he thought. See his review in this section.

The new book discussed in today’s ‘Daily Telegraph’ (‘Mr Briggs’ Hat’ by Kate Colquhoun) is about the first railway murder in England and is well written and  based on wide research, says Leslie Blake, University of Surrey.

Mr Briggs’ Hat is shortlisted for the 2011 Crime Writers' Association Golden Dagger Award for Non-Fiction.

Here's the review and a comment by Kate Colquhoun on how she collected the evidence and on the social importance of the case in Victorian England:

Mr Briggs' Hat by Kate Colquhoun: review

When taking the train really was murder

Now available through the CrimeTalk bookshop:

Basia Spalek: Communities, Identities and Crime The Policy Press: Bristol. 2008. 241 pp.

Identity politics has had a huge impact on the social sciences, particularly in the debate surrounding the fractious and individualist nature of late modernity and the subsequent fate of social identity. This is the theme that runs throughout this new book, and it is highlighted in the first chapter, a clearly written overview of the work of Bauman, Giddens, Beck and Lasch, who are major theorists of social identity. Spalek discusses the relationship between collectivisation - commonly associated with modernity up until the ‘golden age’ of the post-war social democratic settlement - and individualisation, the fragmentation of social units that occurred during the neoliberal turn after the 1980s.

The late Anthony Burgess never anticipated being remembered more for A Clockwork Orange than for anything else, but such has been his fate. He never thought it the best of his many novels, and perhaps it isn’t. But it is a philosophically complex, narratively compelling and stylistically distinctive fable, and, while his overall literary reputation continues to waver since his death in 1993, this short book now keeps company with Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four in the grand pantheon of dystopian literature. After nearly fifty years, it remains in print as a Penguin Classic.

On first publication, in 1962, A Clockwork Orange neither sold well nor impressed critics, although it quietly garnered countercultural fans, notably Andy Warhol and The Rolling Stones. It may never have become really famous, as even Burgess recognised, had not Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of it dragged it into the slipstream of controversy about screen violence. Burgess initially defended the film, but came to feel that it distorted his story, regularly engaging in corrective debate about it, and seeking to reclaim its meaning by creating stage and radio versions, including a short-lived musical for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Northern Stage regularly performed the play for a decade but it never became as iconic as the book and film. Versions have been staged several times at the Edinburgh Festival, and Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre performed it (for a second time) in October 2010, suggesting that some directors still think the story speaks to us, although whether in quite the way Burgess intended is moot – and perhaps also irrelevant.