Malcolm Gaskill’s Worlds of Fear and Wonder (Profile, £12.99) is a collection of beguilingly multifarious essays on “living with the supernatural, past and present”. His intention, in addressing anything from witches to levitating saints, Puritanism to Spiritualism, is to jolt us out of our complacency, our unquestioned assumption that we are very different from, very superior to our benighted ancestors. In many ways, he suggests they were in fact more shrewd, more sensible, than we give them credit for. More interestingly, he raises the possibility that things that we think incredible in the past may just possibly have been true.