Witches and witchcraft supply the source material for Phil Carradice’s engaging and extremely well-written book, Witches & Witch Hunts Through The Ages, which encompasses the entire story of witchcraft – from its roots in healing, herbal medicine, and kitchen remedies, through the great persecution and killing of women in the Middle Ages (often to secure or steal land, money, and property), and on again to more recent times, with the ‘witch hunts’ of McCarthy-era America and men and women accused of witchcraft in contemporary African, Indian, and Caribbean states.

Witchcraft is therefore shown in this brilliant book as something which has touched, or touches, all of us – expanding the definition out from women with pointy hats, hidden away in a wood somewhere, to a tangible and terrible drive to persecute. Whether that takes place on a micro or macro scale, in the workplace or in the world at large, by the Church or by the churlish, what this book shows us is that the concept of witches is one that is made – made evil by association – and manipulated by those with the means to do so, resulting in, at its worst, the deaths of many innocents and even of those who, through healing and helping others, aspire to do good.

I had the very good fortune of being part of an event with author Phil Carradice at the These 3 Streams festival in Llantwit Major recently, in which he spoke eloquently and intelligently about the history of witchcraft and his wide-ranging research for this book. His 87th publication, you can be guaranteed that there is a reason for this writer’s enduring popularity and plethora of works both in print and still being readily published: he is a fine, fine researcher and writer with a way of gathering many facts and threads together into a marvellous and mighty, yet also readily accessible, work. One word about this latest, then: bewitching! So let Carradice’s cunning, well-crafted prose cast its spell on you.