In 1862 Victor Hugo wrote a story about an ordinary guy with a cool name who is sent to prison for a minor crime but turns into a bad guy while serving his sentence. When he is released from prison a couple of decades later, he remains a bad guy until he discovers religion and then becomes a really good guy. Surprisingly, it took Hugo 365 chapters to tell the same tale that some rappers belt out in three minutes. Unsurprisingly, after writing all those words he came to the conclusion that less is more and scrawled The Miserable Ones on the title page. In the late 1970s the Tunisian lyricist Alain Boublil read Hugo’s book, and somewhere between Chapter 178 ( Pestilence and Pox ) and Chapter 301 ( Fresh Bl...