Bronson

Charles Bronson, born Michael Gordon Peterson, goes to prison in 1974 for armed robbery. He never gets out for long. Over the decades that follow he becomes known as Britain's most violent prisoner, and this memoir is his own account of how that happened.

The book follows his years inside the British prison system, many of them in near-continuous solitary confinement. Rooftop protests and hostage incidents recur through the story, and each one adds time to a sentence that keeps growing.

Bronson tells it in the first person, in a blunt voice with little polish. He wrote it with the journalist Robin Ackroyd, and Blake Publishing first brought it out in 2000. The focus stays on his life in custody, not on the people he hurt. He has never been convicted of killing anyone.

This is prison memoir from the extreme end of the penal system, not a conventional true-crime narrative. The 2008 film Bronson, with Tom Hardy, takes loose inspiration from it. The question running through the pages is whether a man who keeps lengthening his own sentence will ever walk out.