This book can be read on different levels: as a bizarre picture of social life at a time when the Church was in its darkest period of lethargy and craft; as a tragi-comedy of a man who, in a profession supposed to devoted to things of the spirit, was obsessed with personal ambitions and status symbols; or as a carefully documented history of the event which started the long process of liberalisation of our laws, including the whole campaign against capital punishment, that has lasted down to the present.