Jonathan Mirsky
Slice and Dice
Death by a Thousand Cuts
By Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue
Harvard University Press 320pp £19.95 order from our bookshop
As I was writing this I heard a stockbroker on Radio 4 describe the economy failing as if ‘tortured’ by ‘the Chinese death of a thousand cuts’. It is an evergreen concept, and definitely not off limits to scholars. These three academic authors, from Oxford, Lyon, and Victoria, British Columbia, have attended conferences, we learn, on ‘The Comparative History of Torture’ and ‘The Representation of Pain’, and their research is published by one of the world’s most prestigious academic presses.
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