Bronson

Bronson is the autobiography of Charles Bronson, born Michael Gordon Peterson, first jailed in 1974 for armed robbery and since branded Britain's most violent prisoner. Written with journalist Robin Ackroyd and first published by Blake Publishing in 2000, the book recounts his decades inside the prison system, including years spent in near-continuous solitary confinement and a string of rooftop protests and hostage incidents that repeatedly added to his sentence.

Told in Bronson's own blunt, first-person voice, the memoir is a firsthand account of life at the extreme end of the British penal system rather than a conventional true-crime narrative about his victims — he has never been convicted of killing anyone. It became a bestseller in the true-crime and prison-memoir category and was later a loose basis for the 2008 film Bronson starring Tom Hardy.