An interesting little book which suffers rather from the author's decision to organise the material into topics. The same cases are therefore revisited at different points in the book, the author attempting to discuss them without being repetitive, but it has the effect of making it rather bitty. There were probably some good insights here and there, but the author was a little too credulous in stating that a good number of people probably were witches in the sense of being poisoners etc. and seemed to lack some of the social awareness which these days is brought to this subject.

A curiosity of the book, apart from its rather creepy cover, are the illustrations by Mervyn Peake which don't always stick to the brief, e.g a cat is shown being thrown into a pond whereas in the narrative it was clearly tossed into the sea. All in all, would rate this a middling 3 star effort. ( )

Fascinating history, full of sympathy and understatement. The illustrations by Peake are lively, human and strange. ( )

A very interesting and nicely written history of British witchcraft. The book does not assume a modern day scientific world-view and is, therefore, quite thought-provoking. Although the author does a good job describing how witchcraft was perceived in its day, she does not probe deeply into the question of whether real witchcraft is actually possible. But why should she? This is, after all, a history book.