The world knows Steven Patrick Morrissey, co-founder of the 1980s indie rock band the Smiths, by his surname alone. He’s the child of Irish Catholic parents who emigrated from Crumlin, Dublin, to Manchester in 1958, the year before he was born. Autobiography describes his childhood in “Victorian knife-plunging Manchester … where murder and sex and self-destruction seep from cracks of local stone”. In his maudlin way, he talks of cellars “where aborted babies found deathly peace instead of unforgiving life”. Morrissey would have no trouble putting chunks of this book to music.His Catholic school was of course a punishing, malevolent place. I was surprised that it took so long for the adjective “Dickensian” to appear. A little later, inevitab