LONDON — Best-selling author Jeffrey Archer walked out of prison Monday, paroled after serving two years and two days of his four-year sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

Lord Archer, 63, had been convicted of lying during his successful 1987 libel action against the Daily Star newspaper, which claimed he had hired a prostitute.

Archer glowered at the dozens of journalists standing outside Hollesley Bay Open Prison in eastern England, but said nothing. In a statement released Sunday, Archer said he would not be giving interviews immediately, but had accepted an invitation to address the Howard League for Penal Reform in September.

In prison, Archer kept himself in the news and, occasionally, in trouble.

While at an open prison, he was allowed to work backstage at a theatre but violated prison regulations by attending a party at the home of a former Conservative cabinet minister.

A prison officer resigned and a police officer came under investigation because they had joined Archer for lunch at a restaurant.

Archer also admitted breaching prison regulations by identifying other inmates in the first instalment of his prison diaries.

In August, Archer signed a contract with Macmillan for two novels and a book of short stories. The first book, Sons of Fortune, a political saga he completed in prison, was published early this year.

In an extract from his second prison diary, published Monday in The Daily Mail newspaper, Archer said he bought a 3.3-carat emerald worth about $12,600 Cdn from a Colombian prisoner as a present for his wife Mary.

"She wore the emerald, mounted in its necklace, during her recent bitter court battle with her former personal assistant Jane Williams," he wrote.

Mary Archer won 2,500 pounds ($5,600 Cdn) and an injunction barring Williams from further disclosures. The case followed from Williams' disclosures to a tabloid newspaper, including the news that Mary Archer had had a facelift.

Jeffrey Archer has bounced back time and again from brushes with scandal, financial ruin and the law.

He was elected to the House of Commons at age 29 in 1969, but within five years resigned after bad investments drove him to bankruptcy. That experience inspired his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.

A former deputy chairman of the Conservatives and tireless fund-raiser for the party, he was honoured with a life peerage in 1992, becoming Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare. He kept the title but was kicked out of the Conservative party in 2000 after admitting he asked a friend to lie for him in his libel case.