He called himself the Witchfinder General, though no such office existed. The title was self-invented, which tells us something important straight away. Matthew Hopkins understood the value of authority before authority had properly been granted to him. In the chaos of the English Civil War — when government fractured, parish life curdled into suspicion, and ordinary people found themselves living inside a country that no longer seemed to know its own rules — that was enough. The famous woodcut of Hopkins captures this atmosphere perfectly. He stands stiffly at the centre in broad-brimmed hat and cloak, less like a supernatural inquisitor than a minor provincial official. Around him gather the alleged witches and their ‘familiars’: grotesque little creatures with names like Pyewacket, Vinegar Tom and Sack and Sugar. (Names that no human agency could invent, apparently.) The image possesses the strange, flattened quality common to seventeenth-century propaganda pamphlets. The accusations began in Manningtree in 1644, where several local women — including Elizabeth Clarke, an elderly one-legged woman — became central to Hopkins’s investigations. In total, nineteen executions took place at Chelmsford after trials held in July 1645. Most of the accused came from surrounding villages, but Manningtree became permanently associated with the panic because it was effectively the starting point of Hopkins’s campaign. What lingers about Manningtree is how ordinary the origins appear. There was no dramatic satanic conspiracy, merely the slow escalation of local suspicion during a period of war, religious extremism and social collapse. Elderly women on the margins of village life became transformed into servants of evil. Between 1644 and 1647, Hopkins and Stearne moved through East Anglia identifying, interrogating and condemning supposed ‘witches.’ The numbers remain disputed, but the scale was extraordinary. In just a few years, they were connected to more executions for witchcraft than England had seen in the previous century. Their work unfolded not in remote medieval darkness, but in early modern villages: places of churchwardens, market days, gossip, debts, grievances and bad harvests.

The plan sounded so absurd that several people inside British intelligence initially assumed it must be a joke. In 1943, the Allies needed to invade Sicily, and the problem was obvious to everyone involved — including Hitler. Sicily sat there on the map with almost embarrassing inevitability. Any competent German strategist would expect the attack. So British intelligence devised a solution of peculiarly English insanity: they would persuade the Nazis that Sicily was merely a diversion by planting fake invasion plans on a dead man and floating him ashore in Spain. This became Operation Mincemeat. The operation emerged partly from an earlier Naval Intelligence memo drafted within Admiral John Godfrey’s department, where a young Ian Fleming worked as assistant. The memo — known as the Trout Memo — compared wartime deception to fly fishing and proposed various schemes for misleading the enemy, including the idea of planting documents on a corpse. The entire operation possesses the atmosphere of a future Bond plot somehow colliding with the exhausted bureaucracy of wartime Whitehall. The corpse belonged to Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welsh labourer who had died in London after swallowing rat poison. In life, he had drifted invisibly through the margins. In death, he became Major William Martin of the Royal Marines — complete with identity papers, theatre tickets, cigarette stubs and a photograph of a fictional fiancée named ‘Pam’. The genius of the operation lay not in the forged military documents but in the tiny details surrounding them. Intelligence officers understood instinctively that people believe untidiness more readily than perfection. So, they gave the dead man overdue bills, keys, personal letters and the accumulated clutter of ordinary existence. And somehow this strange performance of life became moving in its own right. The body was transported aboard the submarine HMS Seraph and released off the Spanish coast near Huelva in April 1943. British intelligence hoped the nominally neutral Spanish authorities would quietly pass the documents to German intelligence before returning them with polite diplomatic embarrassment. Which is precisely what happened.

The BBC documentary Hell’s Angels London now feels less like investigative journalism than a strange piece of national theatre staged for anxious middle-class viewers in 1973. Everything about it carries the atmosphere of Britain trying desperately to understand youth culture through the wrong end of a telescope. The narrator speaks in the grave, faintly appalled tones once reserved for industrial disasters or outbreaks of rabies. Meanwhile, onscreen, the Angels themselves drift through London looking less like an organised threat to civilisation than men who have slept badly for several consecutive years. There is ‘Mad John’, introduced with almost pornographic enthusiasm by the programme as somebody who first appeared in court aged twelve. Other members discuss violence, drugs and mental hospitals with exaggerated gloom, while the VO intones blandly that John’s only friend outside the club is his “half-crazed, cross-eyed Alsatian called ‘Hitler.’” And yet, the documentary remains fascinating precisely because of this awkwardness. Britain in the early seventies possessed a profound fear of social disorder — biker gangs, football hooligans, striking miners, anybody with unkempt hair. The Hell’s Angels became ideal television material because they looked cinematic enough to frighten suburban audiences while remaining, in reality, oddly unthreatening. The most memorable moments are almost accidental. The gang lounging on a derelict barge watching Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who. Endless cups of tea beside motorbikes. Long stretches where apparently terrifying outlaws simply wander around the English countryside looking bored. At one point, they threaten to smash up a café after being refused service, only to lose interest almost instantly. Which is perhaps the real charm of the film. Beneath the BBC sensationalism and performative menace, these are not revolutionaries or hardened criminals, but slightly chaotic working-class men drifting through a damp exhausted country in search of belonging, excitement and petrol money.

One of the oldest English nightmares is also one of the simplest: waking in darkness beneath the earth while everyone above assumes you are dead. The story of Alice Blunden has endured for more than three centuries because it touches that fear with almost unbearable precision. In July 1674, Alice Blunden — the wife of a prosperous Basingstoke maltster — drank a large quantity of poppy-water, a narcotic cordial commonly used at the time for pain and sleep. Soon afterwards, she collapsed into a deep unconsciousness from which nobody could rouse her. A local physician examined her and concluded she had died. Her husband, away in London on business, reportedly requested the funeral be delayed until his return. But the summer was hot, Alice was described with remarkable seventeenth-century brutality as ‘a fat, gross woman’, and her (shitty) relatives decided burial could not wait. So, she was interred in the Holy Ghost Cemetery. Then came the voices. Several days later, boys playing near the grave supposedly heard cries and groans emerging from beneath the earth. At first, this was dismissed. Then others heard the sounds too. The grave was opened, and what followed belongs less to ordinary history than to collective nightmare. Alice’s body was discovered horribly injured. Her winding sheet torn. Her face bloodied. The inside of the coffin battered by desperate movement. According to later accounts, she had clawed frantically at herself and at the coffin lid in an attempt to escape. Yet, when she was removed from the grave no signs of life could be detected. So, in one of the most grotesquely English administrative decisions imaginable, the authorities lowered her back into the ground overnight while waiting for the coroner to arrive in the morning. When they reopened the grave the following day, the scene was apparently worse still. Alice had torn more of the shroud away and beaten her mouth ‘all in gore blood.’ This time she was unquestionably dead. Modern historians doubt parts of the story. Contemporary evidence is surprisingly thin, and later retellings clearly enlarged the horror with each generation. Some scholars argue the injuries could easily have resulted from decomposition rather than desperate attempts at escape. Others suspect the entire narrative evolved gradually from local folklore into gothic legend.

The telegram arrived on the day of the funeral. “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” Nothing else. No explanation. No sympathy. Just those three grotesquely cheerful words sent anonymously from Dublin to the parents of Lieutenant Hubert Chevis after their son had died in agony from strychnine poisoning. Weeks later another message arrived: “It is a mystery they will never solve.” And nearly a century later, it still is. The death of Hubert Chevis possesses the atmosphere of an English detective novel written by somebody slightly unwell. Summer 1931. Surrey. Military camps hidden among pine woods and heathland. Manchurian partridge served for dinner in a bungalow at Deepcut Barracks. The details arrive already carrying the faint unreality of fiction. Chevis himself seemed almost aggressively conventional: handsome artillery officer, Charterhouse-educated, recently married to Frances Rollason, a wealthy divorcée six years older than him. On the evening of the 20th of June, the couple entertained friends with cocktails before dining early so they could attend the Aldershot Tattoo later that night. Dinner was prepared by the cook and served by their batman with the full machinery of upper-middle-class military England still functioning between the wars. Then Chevis tasted the partridge. “Take this bird away,” he reportedly said after one mouthful. “It is the most terrible thing I have tasted.” His wife agreed the meat seemed “fusty”. The birds were taken back to the kitchen and burned. Soon afterwards, Chevis collapsed with violent convulsions. Frances Chevis also became ill, though less severely. By the following morning Hubert was dead. Two grains of strychnine were found in his stomach. What followed feels peculiarly British in its combination of restraint and deepening nightmare. Detectives traced the poisoned birds backwards through butchers, suppliers and storage rooms, discovering no obvious contamination. Nobody appeared to possess motive. The marriage seemed happy. Chevis was popular. His wife inherited money independently and gained little from his death. The partridges themselves had vanished into the kitchen fire before examination could occur.