Birational geometry of algebraic varieties, fibred into Fano double spaces

We develop the quadratic technique of proving birational rigidity of Fano-Mori fibre spaces over a higher-dimensional base. As an application, we prove birational rigidity of generic fibrations into Fano double spaces of dimension $M⩾4$ and index one over a rationally connected base of dimension at most $\frac{1}{2}(M-2)(M-1)$. An estimate for the codimension of the subset of hypersurfaces of a given degree in the projective space with a positive-dimensional singular set is obtained, which is close to the optimal one.