“... and other members of the Royal Society. In 1646, as a young boy, he had testified at the trial of Ann Jefferies, a 19-year-old apprentice in the Pitt family home in Cornwall who claimed she received regular visits from fairies and was accused (and later cleared) of practising witchcraft. In 1696 Pitt published a pamphlet in which he presented Jefferies’s ...”

“... people, if that was possible, but it couldn’t be, could it?’ a gaunt woman called Ann tells him. ‘It’s like asking for the moon.’Already in the 1970s, the Civil Service was ‘hiving off’ – in its own phrase – the hiring and management of cleaners to private subcontracting companies: the same process that has been the focus of ...”