First published in 1963, the original blurb reads: "This may be a unique generation, which has so widely felt the full range of suffering. It is common in London or New York to spend evenings in the company of people who were prisoners of the Japanese, of Hitler, of the Hungarian Communists – or of their own stress and breakdown. Prison, in some form, is the symbol of it.

This is an attempt to discover what has been learnt of this whole range of prison experience – taking prison to be any form of enforced separation from the world of normal life. Thus there are chapters on mental asylum and hospital, as well as political prison and concentration camp. And the emphasis is on the return rather than the experience. What is the lesson of that time of separation? Having travelled to the end of fear, was it the death of fear – or its exposure? That is the question each author was invited to answer."