This is an odd book, brimming with musings and insight that you can’t be sure are going anywhere. At first I thought the book’s elliptical quality might be due to the author’s inartfulness, but I came to see that it was a way of making sense of a phenomenon that seems to be beyond understanding. In the mid-1960s British psychiatrist John Barker became obsessed with the notion of putting people’s premonitions to the test, collecting and cataloging them, then comparing them with the real world to see just how predictive they were, with the help of the ‘Evening Standard’ newspaper and its science writer, Peter Fairley. But because most premonitions involve death and disaster, the book becomes more than a history of this Premonitions Bureau; it is also about death and our beliefs and attitudes around it, whether we can bring on our own deaths or whether death is predetermined, out there lying in wait for us. Knight also explores the nature of time, the brain and how it works, British asylums, and other topics, which don’t always connect neatly but are interesting as a collection of ideas. I still wish he’d finished the thought about angel poop, however.