There’s something about books of this sort that makes my heart sink. I don’t doubt that they are mostly right; and there’s no point in trying to sustain things as ‘mysteries’ when they have been thoroughly and repeatedly disproved, but you are left wondering “what is the point?”

It’s not as if there aren’t already lots of other books like this: James Randi and the CSICOP (now CSI) crew have been churning them out for years. And Broch isn’t breaking new ground. He’s not reporting stunning new research into hitherto impenet­rable weirdness; he’s just taking readers on a brief canter through a series of classic debunks we’ve all seen before.