Republicans constantly defied and resisted authority. They smuggled; they planned escapes; and they disseminated news and told their stories in a literature which was central to morale and the integrity of the struggle. In Captive Columns Eoghan Mac Cormaic (a former IRA prisoner) looks at the prison literature of Irish republicans which saw the production of over sixty prison titles—often handwritten or typed. From the pinpricked sheets of toilet paper in Pentonville Prison in the nineteenth century to Bobby Sands’ poetry, written on toilet paper and smuggled to the outside for publication, this is an astonishing story which has never been examined in such detail before.

It is a work or remarkable research and uses archival photographs and illustrations never published before.