Banged Up is the unedifying story, told without rancour and often with a bitter humour, of a British historian who spends four hundred days in solitary confinement in Austria’s oldest jailhouse, convicted under a 1945 Stalin-era law because of a lecture on history that he has delivered in Vienna sixteen years before. There is outcry in the free world’s press. Soon he is faced with new charges, carrying a twenty-year sentence, for talking to the BBC. Then the case comes to the Court of Appeal.
146 pages
