The Austrian incest story – the one about the “devil dungeon” or the “sex-hell pit”, to use The Sun’s descriptions – is the archetypal tabloid story. It is violent, macabre, conducive to easy moral outrage and of no practical interest to anybody.

Josef Fritzl – “Dungeon Dad”, as he is known to the Hindustan Times – began molesting his daughter, now 42, in the mid-1970s, when she was 11. An electrical engineer, Mr Fritzl turned out to be a diabolical tinkerer, too, of the sort you see in action movies. Over six years, he designed and built a perfectly soundproof living space beneath the apartment house he owned, protected by a 300kg steel door and a complicated electrical entry system. In 1984, he locked his daughter up in it, explaining her absence as a flight, and fathered seven children by her. One died (and was disposed of in a basement incinerator), three were taken in by Mr Fritzl and his unsuspecting wife upstairs, and three lived underground, stooped over, in a 5ft 6in-high windowless space.