When I first came across Carlos Eire’s recent book They Flew, I was awestruck at the courage of the man. He is a Catholic historian and a professor at Yale. And yet here he is, setting out to stretch our imaginations and our prejudices into new shapes, by confronting us with his exploration of “the history of the impossible”.
Of all the fascinating aspects of the miraculous, perhaps the one that takes the biscuit – the one that even I fight shy of, the one that pushes the envelope just too far – is the practice of levitation. Eire acknowledges that it is “strange stuff, for sure, and there is no predicting how anyone might react to it”.
