Premonitions

If someone had, like, a very vivid dreamthat something was gonna go terribly wrong,a plane crash, an avalanche, a death,how would you convey that information?I was reading these books of propheciesand premonitions, these collections that tell youkind of creepy stories of, you know,a girl says I'm gonna die at four o'clock next Tuesdayand then sits in the chairand dies at four o'clock next Tuesday.And I kept coming across little mentionsof this thing called the British Premonitions Bureau,an experiment in the 1960s to…

Sam Knight is a prizewinning British New Yorker journalist whose features and profiles fizz with doggedly chased-down detail distilled into compelling narrative, whether he’s writing about Ronnie O’Sullivan, the £8bn-a-year sandwich industry or preparations for the death of the Queen (“Operation London Bridge”). The Premonitions Bureau, his first book, showcases the gifts that make him so endlessly readable. A richly researched feat of compression, it tells a tantalising tale of the unlikely interplay between the press,…

On 20 October, 1966, 10-year-old Eryl Mai Jones, from Aberfan in south Wales, told her mother about a dream she’d had the night before. “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there,” she said. “Something black had come down all over it.” The next day, at 9.14am, a colliery waste tip came crashing down the hillside, smothering the village school and the surrounding houses. Eryl Mai was among the 144 dead.Visiting Aberfan in the days after the tragedy was John Barker, a 42-year-old psychiatrist and…