With their apparently identikit backgrounds and bland politicians' patter, the contest has sometimes seemed an incestuous choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. When even the promised fratricidal war between the Miliband brothers failed to take off, one newspaper cartoonist illustrated a caricature of the contestants with the caption: Who cares who wins?

But when Mexican feminists hit the streets on Valentine’s Day to denounce their country’s worsening femicide crisis, she saw a chance to ensure her mother’s life and death were remembered.

A little lumpen novelita. [Story of orphaned teenagers turning to crime.]

The huge square box, parquet-floored and high-ceilinged, had been arranged to display a suite of bedroom furniture designed and made in the halcyon days of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, […].