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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Other articles by this contributor:
I have washed my feet out of it · Growing up in Ghana
Some girls want out · spectacular saintliness
Saartjie Baartman’s Ghost · The New Apartheid
‘What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!’ · Springtime for Robespierre
The Real Price of Everything · The Many Lives of Elizabeth Marsh
What He Could Bear · A Brutal Childhood
If you’d seen his green eyes · The People’s Robespierre
Is it still yesterday? · Children of the Revolution
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