Robert Maudsley, known as Hannibal the Cannibal and the UK's longest-serving prisoner, is set to spend his 51st Christmas behind bars. The quadruple killer, now 71, is considered so dangerous that he has been kept in a special cell away from other inmates for nearly 17,000 days or 46 years.

Born on Merseyside in 1953, Maudsley was first sent to Broadmoor secure hospital in 1974 after garrotting John Farrell. He earned his chilling nickname after killing three men while detained: one fellow patient at Broadmoor in 1977 and two prisoners at HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire in 1978.

One of his victims was found with a blade made from a plastic spoon in his ear, leading to the moniker Hannibal the Cannibal, despite postmortem results disproving claims that Maudsley had eaten his brain. His specially designed, high-security cell has drawn comparisons to that of Dr Hannibal Lecter in the film The Silence of the Lambs.

Maudsley once penned: "The prison authorities see me as a problem, and their solution has been to put me into solitary confinement and throw away the key, to bury me alive in a concrete coffin. It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind."