The Premonitions Bureau

This is an illuminating look into a quirky and previously unknown to me avenue of fairly recent British history. It tells the story of the Premonitions Bureau, an organisation that tried harness the aid of psychics in predicting disasters. It started up after the horrors of Aberfan, and ran through the rest of the sixties. largely led by two interesting and contrasting characters, who drive the narrative. It's an interesting history, but that's all it is. The book never really interrogates the idea of premonition, and isn't that interested in questions about the existence of such a force.A lot of the cases described in the book seem to me to be instances of trying to make a vision fit an event by looking at the similarities and ignoring the inconvenient differences. There's almost no argument about premonition versus coincidence, and if there was indeed any basis in fact for the Bureau's work. The author does find room for some philosophical conundrums (if a psychic predicting a disaster means that disaster is averted, does that mean the prediction was false in the first place as there was no disaster?) but I kept reading expecting some sort of analysis of the realism of the whole idea, and was left hanging. Perhaps it's outside of the book's remit, but it's not a long work, and I believe it would have been improved by some more rigorous analysis of the psychics' claims. It's a very interesting read as far as it goes, but I wish it had gone a bit further.