With its hints of incest and its portrait of a doomed family hagridden by history, Alejandra's tale is South American gothic at its most feverish.

But most of Joseph in Egypt is given over to a study of the mad passion of Potiphar's wife for Joseph�a passion that, in Mann's account, transforms her from a cool and indolent lady of fashion to a desperate, pitiable, hagridden monster, willing to consider the murder of her husband and finally abandoning all shame in the terrific scene that is the climax of the Biblical account.

What he wanted to know, said Kawamura, was why he had been hagridden by bad luck since birth?

Moreover a man cannot be hagridden; if he wants to get away from women, there is all outdoors to hide in.

Wales in the 19th century was barren, poor, diseased and hagridden with superstition.