Malcolm Gaskill

Malcolm Gaskill, an emeritus professor in early modern history at UEA, wrote in the LRB about his decision to leave academia. His books include Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans and The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World; the latter was shortlisted for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. He is writing a book about Allied POWs and partisans in wartime Italy.

This is​ what happens when you die. Electricity stops flowing through your neural circuitry and consciousness shuts down as though a switch has been flicked. Blood keeps moving for a while, ebbing without the heart’s propulsion before succumbing to gravity and pooling in the lower back where it congeals. Starved of oxygen, cells are dismantled by enzymes with nothing else to do now life is at an end.

On​ 23 March 1944 Italian resistance fighters ambushed an SS company marching up via Rasella, a quiet street in central Rome. At 3.45 p.m. Rosario Bentivegna, a 21-year-old medical student, lit the fuse on a bomb hidden in a dustcart, then walked away. Fifty seconds later the bomb exploded. Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets. More...

In​ the summer of 1942, an Oxfordshire housewife began a series of brief encounters with a man who was not her husband. They met at a café in Birmingham and then in Banbury on the edge of the Cotswolds, where they strolled arm in arm, like lovers trying to forget the war. They had much in common: both were cultured Germans, refugees from the Nazis. But their secret meetings...

Letter

Kent’s Own Pompeii

21 October 2021

The Isle of Sheppey, described by Patrick McGuinness as ‘a stereotype of terminal England and insular Englishness’, has a fixed place in my childhood imagination (LRB, 21 October). Though only twelve miles from where I grew up, to get there you had to make a perversely sharp turn off the A2 (which was heading sensibly to Canterbury), and into a timeless estuary world whose coastal outpost was the...

Short Cuts: Charity Refused

Malcolm Gaskill, 9 September 2021

Afew weeks ago,​ a man appeared in my front garden as I was trimming the hedge. Slight in stature, in his early twenties with short dark hair, he was wearing a huge hold-all as though it were a rucksack. His unsmiling face radiated intensity as he began his spiel: name, from the North, recent discharge from the army, trying to get back on his feet. He even gave his service number, as if old...

Mary Parsons revealed that she had chosen to marry her husband because she suspected him of practising witchcraft. She was arrested, watched closely during the night and grilled about her belief that...

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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...

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