If buttons, balloons or premature burial terrify you, rest assured you’re not alone

Every summer, during our holiday in Orkney, there is a moment of panic. We’re standing on a dizzying cliff – looking across a sleeve of sea at the Old Man of Hoy, maybe – and I’m consumed with a longing to fling myself over. It’s not suicidal. I just yearn to feel the wild rush of air against my cheeks: I want to fly. I’ve never met anyone who shares this compulsion, but The Book of Phobias and Manias assures me it’s quite common. Indeed, it has a name: acrophobia. Kate Summerscale understands it perfectly: ‘The whirl of vertigo,’ she says, can ‘seem like the giddiness of yearning.’

A new book from Summerscale is always a treat. She does vast amounts of research, and then manages to let go of it, and take flight in prose that is both forensic and conversational. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and The Wicked Boy explore Victorian murders, and The Haunting of Alma Fielding reanimates an investigation into a poltergeist on the eve of the second world war.