Did people foresee Aberfan? THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU investigates psychiatry & the paranormal

The debut book by UK journalist Sam Knight grew from a long-form article for his most regular publisher, the New Yorker, and in painting a semi-hidden world – clandestine, not necessarily crooked – maintained with a dry officiousness, The Premonitions Bureau operates on ground where he shines. (You may have encountered a hit Guardian essay of Knight’s from five years ago, outlining the extensive and often bizarre state itinerary for when the Queen dies.)

This is a non-fiction title, though sometimes sketches its characters with a novelist’s pen, and was assembled with multiple interviews and access to documents held by the protagonist’s surviving family. Psychiatrist John Barker was inspired to found The Premonitions Bureau in 1966 after hearing of a Welsh schoolgirl who had foreseen the Aberfan disaster. Britons claiming to possess similar gifts were invited to submit their hunches about imminent traumatic events, and if the success rate was tiny as a percentage, within that number lay some genuinely eerie heads-ups.

A short-lived exercise due to Barker’s death in 1968, the philosophy and practice of the Bureau ties into the writings of Freud and Kant, mental health provision, and people’s tendency towards confirmation bias. One can be sceptical of the broad exercise – Knight often seems so, without ever explicitly saying it – and still find this book a perfectly entertaining portrait of a strange little sect mushrooming in polite society.