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FRED THE RIPPER

April 8, 2024 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment
Frederick Deeming with a moustache drawn on the image in ink, Victoria Police Museum

Could he have been ‘Jack the Ripper? The remarkably evil life of Frederick Deeming is one of the most chilling stories of Australian, and global, crime. Even if he did not commit the Whitechapel murders of 1888, his known slayings make him one of the worst serial killers of the nineteenth century.

Beaten by his unstable father and imbued with fear of damnation by his God-obsessed mother, Frederick Bailey Deeming got off to a bad start in life almost as soon as he was born in Leicestershire, England in 1853. He was already known as ‘Mad Fred’ when he went to sea around the age of sixteen and soon became a cunning criminal. Fraud and false pretences were his favoured offences, though he also thieved from time to time.[i]

With an ability to turn on the charm and a persuasive way with words, the ruggedly handsome young sailor with blue eyes, fair hair and a ginger moustache had little trouble forming serious relationships with respectable women. In 1881 he married Marie James in England. By the middle of the next year he was in Sydney where he had jumped ship and started work as a plumber and gas fitter. By the time Marie arrived to join him he had already served a six-week sentence for stealing gas-burners. The couple would have four children over the next few years during which Deeming briefly ran his own plumbing business until he was declared bankrupt and serving two weeks for committing perjury. In January 1888 he turned up, alone, in Cape Town, South Africa where, using the alias Henry Lawson, he conducted several successful swindles.

Back in England in 1890, and still calling himself Henry Lawson, Deeming bigamously married Helen Matheson, using the proceeds of a fraud to pay for the wedding. Soon after, he had to quickly leave the country and escaped to Uruguay, South America. He was later arrested there, returned to England and given nine months in prison for fraud, though he  avoided any charge of bigamy.

After release in 1891, Deeming took another alias, Albert Williams, and rented a house in Rainhill, Lancashire. By this time, his deserted wife and children had tracked him down and Marie revealed her husband’s bigamy to Helen. Apparently too embarrassed at the social stigma this would bring upon her, Helen did not inform the authorities. Deeming, now fearing what else Marie night reveal about him, made an elaborate pretence of reconciliation and convinced her and the children to join him at Rainhill. It was a fatal error.

Shortly after the reconciliation ‘Williams’, now posing as an army officer, married for a third time. The unlucky woman was Emily Mather who, after the expensive wedding, sailed with her new husband to India where he said he had a posting. But Deeming changed the arrangements and the newlyweds went to Melbourne instead. Here they rented a house in Windsor. Always ostentatious, even if mostly with other peoples’ money, the outwardly charming ‘Druin’, as Deeming was now styling himself, soon became well known in the suburb. But in January 1892, he and his third wife disappeared.

Now, a chain of events began that would lead to Deeming’s eventual downfall. The next tenant in the Windsor house complained of a foul smell in the premises. A hearthstone in the bedroom was pulled up to reveal Emily’s badly decomposed remains. She had been beaten around the head and her throat slashed. In the house police also found a copy of the invitation to the wedding banquet of A O Williams and Helen. 

In a little over a week, the police tracked Deeming down to the Western Australian mining town of Southern Cross where he was calling himself Baron Swanston and posing as an engineer. After murdering Emily he had committed some further frauds and sailed to Sydney. There the apparently personable murderer soon convinced another young woman to become his fiancée. He then left for Western Australia, arranging with her to follow him when he was settled.

Deeming’s arrest ignited what would become a national and international press sensation. An English journalist used details from Australian sources to backtrack Deeming to his previous rented premises in Lancashire. The authorities there were prompted to investigate. Under the kitchen floor they found the bodies of Marie and the four children, all with their throats cut. The enormity of Deeming’s crimes was now apparent. 

The press certainly thought so and went into one of the regular ‘feeding frenzies’ that have become all too familiar since. A kind of mass public hysteria arose, known as ‘Deemania’. The accused  was called ‘a human tiger’ and his actions dubbed ‘the crime  of the century’. He would also be described, inaccurately, as ‘ape-like’ and a forensic expert would later claim that his skull was similar to that of a gorilla.[ii]

Although entitled to the presumption of innocence, Deeming was effectively tried and found guilty in the newspapers of the English-speaking world. He was tried for the murder of Emily under the name of ‘Williams’. His defence, which included Alfred Deakin, destined to be an early Australian Prime Minister, argued that the accused had been denied a fair trial, which was probably true. Deeming was almost certainly an epileptic, having suffered from fits for much of his life. He may also have been a schizophrenic fantasist who actually became the identities he invented as he committed his crimes. But after an unwise address to the jury from the dock and some unconvincing psychiatric testimony, he was quickly found guilty and sentenced to death. 

After being refused leave to appeal by the Privy Council, Edward Bailey Deeming, alias Albert Williams and at least four other pseudonyms, was hanged on 23 May 1892. Always a poser, he walked to the gallows smoking a cigar. His last words were reportedly ‘Lord, receive my spirit’. Outside the prison wall, twelve thousand people assembled to await the news that the monster was dead.

His death was celebrated in an English children’s street rhyme based on the then popular belief that Deeming was Jack the Ripper:

On the twenty-first of May,
Frederick Deeming passed away;
On the scaffold he did say —
“Ta-ra-da-boom-di-ay!”
“Ta-ra-da-boom-di-ay!”
This is a happy day,
An East End holiday,
The Ripper’s gone away.[iii]

Deeming was undoubtedly guilty of the horrendous murders of  his children and two wives, with the likely intent to kill another. But could he have been ‘Jack the Ripper?

In the overheated press speculations on the case, the fact that Deeming’s movements in 1888 were murky, together with the grisly nature of his crimes, led to speculation that he might have been the Whitechapel killer. Some credibility was attached to the claim when Deeming told fellow prisoners that he was the ripper and also expressed a murderous dislike of women. This was based on his venereal infection, probably of syphilis, contracted from a prostitute during his extensive travels. When directly questioned about this on the eve of his execution, deeming refused to confirm or deny the possibility.

But the theory has so many flaws that it is taken seriously by very few.[iv] A major problem is that Deeming’s murders bore little resemblance to the butchery of most of the Whitechapel victims. Nor were the women he killed prostitutes. Unlike the Whitechapel murderer, Deeming was not known to have taken trophies of his victims. Finally, wherever Deeming was during those bloody months of 1888 – probably South Africa – there is no evidence that he was anywhere near London, let alone the east end.

But there is no doubt that he slew Emily, the crime for which he eventually hanged, and that he also killed Marie and his children. He never confessed to any of these murders but while in prison during the lead up to his trial and as he awaited execution, Deeming wrote his autobiography, later destroyed, and poetry, which included the lines:

The Jury listened well to the yarn I had to tell, 

But they sent me straight to hell.

Deeming’s death mask

From Australia’s Most Infamous Criminals

[i] Barry O. Jones, ‘Deeming, Frederick Bailey (1853–1892)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/deeming-frederick-bailey-5940/text10127, published first in hardcopy 1981, accessed online 26 July 2022.

[ii] The Argus, 25 January 1930, p. 6.

[iii] Larry S Barbee, ‘Frederick Bailey Deeming’, Jack the Ripper Casebook, https://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/book_reviews/non-fiction/cjmorley/48.html, accessed July 2022.

[iv] Over fifty books have been written about Deeming, often revolving around the unlikely belief that he was Jack the Ripper. See Worldcat Identities, ‘Deeming, Frederick Bailey 1853-1892, https://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n2007021186/, accessed July 2022.

Mything in Action – The Thylacine Files

December 6, 2022 By in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING, THYLACINE FILES, Uncategorized Tags: , Leave a comment

Recent research has turned up more fascinating facts and exposed a hoary myth about the last Thylacine, or ‘Tasmanian Tiger’. What the researchers had to say about their discovery of the skin of the last of these mythic beasts and the ‘bullsh..t’ that the animal was a male named ‘Benjamin’ is related at the link below. A small case study of how misinformation and myth arises and persists.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-06/benjamin-thylacine-tasmanian-tiger-naming-myth-persists/101734442

WHO WERE THE CHARTISTS? Part 2

February 11, 2022 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment
To Henry Hunt, Esq., as chairman of the meeting assembled in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, sixteenth day of August, 1819, and to the female Reformers of Manchester and the adjacent towns who were exposed to and suffered from the wanton and fiendish attack made on them by that brutal armed force, the Manchester and Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry, this plate is dedicated by their fellow labourer, Richard Carlile. Manchester Libraries.

*

According to historian Isobel Dowling writing on Chartism in the 19th Century in her Ballarat Reform League, Inc.

‘There was no such thing as a typical Chartist. Chartists had different social, religious, educational and occupational  backgrounds.’ 

Most Chartists were intelligent and honest.’

‘All Chartists thought of themselves as workers, as bees not drones’ 

Chartist newspapers like ‘The Northern Star’ of Leeds owned by Feargus O’Connor advertised their meetings. Poets, singers, musicians and comedians performed at those meetings. Works by artists and artisans decorated Chartist homes. Beethoven, poems by Byron, Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Robbie Burns’ ‘A Man’s a Man For a’ That’ reflected unrest and desire for social reform in Europe and Britain. These were utilised in Chartist meetings along with works created by Chartists themselves. Working class culture blossomed as Chartist organisations intended they should. Large concerts and leaders who were performers were common.

All this in spite of opposition from the new middle class comprised of mill owners, mine owners, industrialists, merchants, and wealthy landlords whose wealth and power were triggered by the Industrial Revolution. This period which had caused much economic unhappiness in communities was previously made up of agricultural workers, small farmers and self-sufficient artisans with cottage industries. Corn Laws and Poor Laws caused hunger and homelessness to spread poverty, inequality and social unrest.

Some Chartists came from the ‘working class’, people who did not own income generating property. At that time teachers, doctors, and ministers of religion were included. Others came from the ‘thinking classes’,  academics, writers, artists and artisans.  Many members came from non-conformist religions such as Methodist, Baptist and Congregationalist, as such they were abstainers of alcohol. Thinkers not drinkers? Subsequently, Temperance played a role in the fact that two forms of Chartism developed: 

Moral Chartism led by thoughtful William Lovett wanted votes for women, temperance and use of reason. ’We are of opinion’, wrote Lovett, ‘that whatever is gained in England by force, by force must be sustained: but whatever springs from knowledge and justice will sustain itself’. They used as a slogan:

 ‘Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must.’ 

Physical Chartism, led by a fierce Feargus O’Connor, wanted the franchise only for men, was non-Temperance, and advocated violence to gain the Chartist Points. Their slogan, appropriately, had more punch:

              ‘Moral persuasion is all a humbug, nothing persuades like a lick in the lug.’ 

Although in the main it was only ‘votes for men’ that were strongly advocated, there were branches of Chartism run by women. One in Birmingham had 3,000 members.  Staunch women Chartists had campaigned as suffragists for ‘votes for women’, long before the creation of the word ‘suffragette’ by a British Daily Mail reporter in 1906 when use of violence by women became a strategy. Chartists had influenced the Pankhurst family from Manchester who were the ones who went on to lead the ‘suffragette movement’ and collect the credit from history for gaining votes for women. 

CHARTISM FADED – BUT NOT EVERYWHERE 

Bitter enmity between the two Chartist leaders created disunity within the movement, as did policy differences. Chartism’s  appeal faded from 1848 to the final National Convention in 1858. The reasons why it flamed so brightly and faded so easily are not made clear by historians. Clouded instead by the mists of time, misted history, a mystery? 

Was it opposition to temperance, or desire for use of violence that caused Chartism to fail, or did Chartism founder on the rocks of trenchant opposition to votes for women? Rocks that still exist and which, when laid bare, reveal the ‘slime of misogyny.’ As women in Britain took decades longer than New Zealand and Australian women to gain the franchise it is not surprising that such an answer seems possible. When women worldwide continue to be assaulted violently and murdered at an alarming rate and, in some places, denied education, such a thought is amplified. 

Australian women were supported by far-sighted men to gain franchise. It is tempting to ask did those men have Chartist influences? Could today’s lads look to such blokes as William Lovett as models for positive manhood? He wrote ‘Liberty in a smock frock is more than a match for tyranny in armour’ and, in 1856:

‘Would man in lovely woman ever find, 

His best adviser, lover truest friend, 

…    He must at once his gothic laws annul, 

Fling back her dower, strive only for her love. 

And proudly raise her up all rights to share.’     

Perhaps  some Chartists were stymied by the fact that in 1845, Marx and Engels left Brussels to visit the leaders of Chartists in England? Engels had already spent two years living in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Marx in particular seriously considered whether English Chartist methods might make peaceful change possible. Did such Leftist interest alarm too many moderate Chartists? 

Although favour for Chartists dwindled in Britain, Chartism flourished elsewhere, particularly in Australia. Social unrest simmered from the French Revolution and reappeared in the uprising of thousands of miners in Bendigo and Ballarat. Chartists of both Moral and Physical persuasion, convict Chartists and free settlers took part in the Red Ribbon riots and other radical goldfields meetings. The Eureka event drove creation of our political structures, social reforms and wording of the Australian Constitution by Samuel Griffiths. 

STABILISATION OF  AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRACY THROUGH CHARTISM

This list of achievements testifies to the argument that Australian Democracy is more stable than those of the USA or UK:

1.1856 Secret Ballot —so close to first it became known as ‘The Australian Ballot’

2.1856 Universal Suffrage -Voting Rights for Men, one of the first in world

3.1856 Trade Union Success by stone masons in gaining an Eight-Hour Day, first in world 

4.1866 Five of the six points of the Chartists had been realised in Victoria and New South Wales

5.1901 Unity through Federation

6.1902  First in the world for women to both vote and stand for Federal Parliament

7. 1910  First Labo(u)r Party in power in the world

8. 1924 Compulsory Voting – only English-speaking country – only 11 other countries enforce it 

9. 1929 National Broadcaster (ABC) that guarantees at least a portion of a free press

Historian John Moloney gave a lecture in the Senate, Parliament House Canberra, on the 150th Anniversary of Eureka, 23 April 2004. After speaking about desire for a public commemoration of Eureka, he declared:

 … but there is one work that is never done, one work that will always need revivifying and defending because Democracy is much more than a system. It is an ideal, a spirit born day by day in those who believe in it. Eureka had its brief and bloody day a Century and a half ago. Eureka lives in the hearts and will of every Australian who understands, believes in, and acts on the principle that the people are the only legitimate source of political power. (John Molony ‘ Eureka and the Prerogative of the People’).

Although I was born in Ballarat, educated near and in Bendigo, it was not in history classes  where knowledge of the Eureka Stockade was given to me but from performances held through folk festivals, sessions run by Graham Seal, Keith McKenry, Warren Fahey, Jan Wositzky and information links from Gwenda Davey, Ken Mansell and Russell Hanna, as well as the works of Henry Lawson, bolstered later with knowledge gained from published books. 

In the next post find out about the Ten Links in the Australian Chartist chain …

AN UPDATE ON MYRA SYKES

February 10, 2022 By in Uncategorized Tags: , Leave a comment

Join Dr Kate as she unearths the incredible story of the Toodyay Letters.  A heartbreaking set of ten original letters written from the perspective of Myra Sykes to her husband, William, who was transported to the Swan River Colony as a convict in 1867. Myra lived in poverty in the Sheffield area, raising four children without her husband. She was largely illiterate. It was thought other people must have scribed the letters on her behalf. The letters range from the period 1867-1879.

William died in 1891 in Toodyay, and the family was never reunited. Dr Kate explains the survival of this set of letters is a story in itself and set the scene for preserving the convict history of WA.

These letters  are not yet digitised but can be read in the books Alexandra Hasluck’s ‘Unwilling Emigrants: letters of a convict’s wife’ and Graham Seal’s ‘These Few Line: the lost lives of Myra and William Sykes’.

Recorded on ABC Radio Perth on 3 December 2021.

You can listen here…

THE REDEMPTION OF MYRA SYKES

February 9, 2022 By in Uncategorized Tags: , Leave a comment

Print from The Graphic of 28 November 1874: General View of Sheffield from the east – Taken from St. John’s Church, 28 November 1874 by ‘JRB’.

Born into the smoke and fire of northern England’s industrial revolution, Myra Sykes had to earn her daily bread early in life. Working as a domestic servant, she married foundryman William Sykes in 1853. The children soon began arriving and William struggled to keep his growing family. 

Like so many other Yorkshire men of the time, William supplemented his basic wages with a little poaching. One cloudy moonlit October night in 1865, William and a few others took their snares and dogs to Silver Wood in Yorkshire. Their poaching exploit turned into a violent struggle between the armed keepers of a local magistrate’s hunting rights and the poachers. The poachers manged to get away but a keeper died and after a police investigation William Sykes got the blame. 

There were two sensational trials. Despite strong support in the local jury, William was  eventually convicted of manslaughter and transported to Australia for life. His story continued in the West Australian bush and Myra’s continued in industrial Yorkshire as she struggled to raise her and William’s three children – as well as a fourth fathered by another man.

Except for the chance survival of letters between Myra and William, their stories would have never been told. As it turned out, these nobodies of history maintained a relationship of sorts across half the planet for over twenty years. Through these few scribbled lines of recrimination, longing and a kind of love, we can read about their efforts to make some sort of a life for themselves in very different, yet difficult, circumstances. 

Myra worked hard at whatever domestic work she could get. Her love and longing for the lost William shines through her letters as she tries to feed and clothe his and her children. In the end, Myra found some peace and redemption in her troubled life. 

Her story, and William’s, is told in my book, These Few Lines. As well as a tale of triumph over adversity, it is an intense family history. Since publication, the book has revealed several of Myra’s descendants. There may well be more in England, Australia, New Zealand or elsewhere.

The award-winning These Few Lines is available in a paperback or e book edition through  https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780733324468/these-few-lines-a-convict-romance/ or the usual internet booksellers.

CONDEMNED REVIEWS

September 22, 2021 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Condemned is picking up a good few reviews in the BBC History Magazine, the Literary Review (UK), Australian Book Review, Crikey and elsewhere. A few quotes:

‘a powerful account of how coerced migration built the British Empire is contained in Condemned’

‘Incisive and moving’

Methodist Recorder (UK), May 2021

‘A brilliant and moving work’

‘What good history can do, and what it needs to be to be good, is shown by Australian historian Graham Seal’s Condemned’

‘It is a rip-snorter of a book, as well as scholarly history’

Guy Rundle, Crikey, 18 September 2021

Purchase hardback, e-book, audio book or paperback (Australia only) at:

Book Details

or from Amazon https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300246483/condemnedhttps://www.amazon.com/Condemned-Transported-Children-Britains-Empire/dp/030024648X

HOLY GRAILS!

August 27, 2021 By in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

Christ appears to a hermit in a vision, holding a book containing the true history of the Holy Grail. From History of the Holy Grail, French manuscript, early 14th century
Copyright © The British Library Board

There’s a lot of them about, Holy Grails, that is. But one in Spain has an intriguing tale to tell.

The venerable Christian relic known as the Cup of Christ, the Lord’s Chalice and, most evocatively, ‘The Holy Grail’ is the centre of a twisting tale of history and myth. Every facet of its corporeality – shape, colour, size – is uncertain, as is its origins. It is said, variously, to have been the cup or plate used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper; to have been the bowl used to collect Christ’s blood as he died on the Cross, or both. Then again, it might just be a symbol encoding the mysteries and meanings of the Holy Communion.

We first hear of this relic in medieval Europe where it appears in a number of romances from around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is also the context in which we first hear of the involvement of the Knights Templar in the guardianship of the Grail, a notion that has fed a fecund flow of often farcical fiction right up to the present day. By the fifteenth century it melded into the Celtic Arthurian legends then very much in vogue at court and wherever people could afford books and were able to read them, or have them read aloud. Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) is the main vehicle for this transformation. In all these variations of the tale, the Grail is located not in the Middle East but in Europe.

How the Grail actually got from its original location in Jerusalem to Europe is a similarly slippery story. One version is that it was brought by the disciple, Peter, when he went there to bring the gospel to the west. This one, not surprisingly, seems to have at least the tacit approval of the Roman Catholic church given Peter’s significance in its founding. 

Another, more folkloric tradition, concerns Joseph of Arimathea, the man who is said to have taken responsibility for the transmission of the dead Jesus to the disciples who interred him in Joseph’s garden in a man-made cave.  In this version, of which there are several variants, the Grail is usually said to have been a wooden cup taken to England by Joseph, or his followers, where a Christian institution was founded at Glastonbury. This strand of the legend, which may only date from the late nineteenth century[1] also continues to have potency in the modern era as a variety of people seeking spiritual awareness and confirmation, as well as Christians, actively venerate the Glastonbury area, with its intriguing pre-Christian resonances of standing stones and paganism in general.

None of these stories have any credible historical evidence to support them. Like the obsession of the Nazis with aspects of the Cathar version of the legend,[2] they are purely the blended outcomes of belief and fictioneering, producing a potent and enduring myth.

But, relatively recently, another unexpected strand has been added to the rich narrative of the Holy Grail. In 2006 and 2010, a number of early Islamic manuscripts were said to have been discovered in Egypt and translated. They provide potentially verifiable evidence of the history of one particular object identified as the Holy Grail by Islamic sources as early as 400CE. According to Margarita Torres Sevilla and José Miguel Ortega Del Río, the academic authors of Kings of the Grail, an object long identified as the Holy Grail in its place of imputed was kept in Jerusalem for the first thousand years or so of its existence. There, it was visited and venerated by pilgrim Christians for centuries. 

Jerusalem was under Muslim control at this point and around 1053-54 a Caliph took the Grail and gifted it to a Muslim ruler in Spain. This man wished to develop good diplomatic relations with the Christian Ferdinand 1 of León and decided to send the object to him. By then the object, described as a stone cup, was said to have medicinal powers. The great Muslim leader, Saladin ((Salah-ad-din), would later play a part in this version of the Grail story, using a ‘fine shard’ previously struck from the object to cure his daughter’s illness. The authors of the book use these documents and other evidence to trace the journey of the Grail to where, they argue, is its current resting place, the Basilica of San Isadoro in León.[3]

So, we now have a new and, it seems, authoritative historical identification of the resting place of the Holy Grail. Not Dan Brown’s Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland; not Rennes-le-Château in Cathar country; and not in the glowing mysteries of the Arthurian romances. It’s in Spain.

Whatever we might think of this argument, remembering that it is made by academics from the region, it seems that this line of Grail legend has some serious historical cred. Far more than any of the many other Grails around the world, including several in Britain and Ireland, some in Italy, one in Vienna, and another in America, among others.

Why does it all matter? For Christians, the answer is obvious. The Grail is a relic as closely associated with the body and death of Jesus Christ as possible. It’s up there with the True Cross, the reed used to give him water and the sponge used to cruelly whet his lips with vinegar as he died. As the authors of Kings of the Grail show, these relics were exhibited in the Temple together with their version of the Grail for centuries. 

Interestingly, the Grail does not seem to have been accorded any more significance in this period than the other sacred items, until around the time that it was sent off to Europe for some diplomatic ingratiation. It may be that we owe the evolution of the Holy Grail into Christendom’s most sacred relic to the power politics of the Muslim world as much as the romancing of medieval European troubadours and writers.

[1] S. Baring-Gould, A Book of The West: Being an Introduction to Devon and Cornwall (2 Volumes, Methuen 1899; A Book of Cornwall, Second Edition 1902, New Edition, 1906. 

A W Smith, “‘And Did Those Feet…?’: The ‘Legend’ of Christ’s Visit to Britain” Folklore 100.1 (1989), pp. 63–83.

[2] Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands, Maclehose, 2013. Chapter 8 ‘The Migrations of the Grail’ on Otto Rahn’s Nazi fantastications and also good on other aspects of Grail legendry. See also chapter 14 on the modern crypto-historical invention of The Priory of Syon and the alleged bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, as popularised in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

[3] Margarita Torres Sevilla and José Miguel Ortega Del Río, Kings of the Grail: Tracing the Historical Journey of the Cup of Christ to Modern-Day Spain, The Overlook Press, New York, 2015. Translated from the Spanish edition of 2014 by Rosie Marteau.