Brendan Behan — Irish Playwright

Borstal Boy

Borstal Boy is Irish writer, Brendan Behan’s, autobiography and was first published in 1958. My copy is a 1970 Corgi paperback (pictured below) and is (as the tag line on the cover proclaims) a bawdy, swaggering and outrageous read, with the opening couple of pages a beautifully crafted description of the sixteen year Brendan’s arrest in a dowdy bedsit with his suitcase full of drugs and IRA…