The dead are all around us 
Hilary Mantel
- Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches by Malcolm Gaskill
April 1944. Winston Churchill sent a memo to Herbert Morrison at the Home Office:
Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost of this trial to the State, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London, for a fortnight, and the Recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts?
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Hilary Mantel whose books include A Place of Greater Safety, Giving up the Ghost and Beyond Black, is working on a new novel called Wolf Hall.
Other articles by this contributor:
Frocks and Shocks · Jane Boleyn
Some girls want out · spectacular saintliness
Is it still yesterday? · Children of the Revolution
Giving up the Ghost · My Life as a Boy
What He Could Bear · A Brutal Childhood
That Wilting Flower · The Lure of the Unexplained
The Real Price of Everything · The Many Lives of Elizabeth Marsh
Is the particle there? · Schrödinger in Clontarf
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