ABSTRACT
Most of the conversations between us took place either in his cell when he was officially supposed to be somewhere else working, or in my room late in the evening when all the staff in that part of the prison had locked-up their offices and gone home. He was softlyspoken, widely-read and highly intelligent, and serving a long sentence for an offence involving violence but which was not murder. Compared with the majority of the other prisoners, he was young: as he said on one occasion with a thin smile and a sardonic curl of his upper lip, ‘The Judge said it was only my age which saved me from getting a very heavy sentence.’
