Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches (Paperback)

Malcolm Gaskill’s brilliant book ... not only offers an indelible account of a paranoid country at war with enemies tangible and supernatural, but teasingly invites us to take our own position on witchcraft, and its unlikely practitioner. A fascinating book. A great strength of Malcolm Gaskill’s book is that it provides ... a piece of working-class history: he makes Spiritualism comprehensible in the context of the utter bleakness of the lives he describes. Malcolm Gaskill has researched the whole story of Helen Duncan’s life with exemplary thoroughness: his account sparkles with dry humour, but it is not without sympathy too. Full of quirky detours into Spiritualism’s uniquely odd hall of fame. But its chief fascination, I think, lies in the way it shows how the Spiritualist movement, for a certain group of women, proved to be more liberating than winning the vote. Malcolm Gaskill’s book is full, admirably researched, and in parts reads as if it had been dictated from the other world. Extremely readable ... full of trenchant phrases and vivid analogies. It is balanced, fair and a salutary reminder, in our secularised society, that belief in the supernatural is still endemic. A tremendous story ... The human relationship with magic is one in which tragedy and farce are constantly intermixed, and Malcolm Gaskill shows how vividly this was true in early twentieth-century Britain. The colourful story of Britain’s last witch trial ... Superbly researched, densely written but mostly entertaining.