The spirits of the age

Children started knocking on my door last month wearing Donald Trump face masks and asking for money. Indeed, one enterprising group turned up as Trump, Kim Jong-un, a Disney Princess, and — I’ll admit that this had to be explained to me — a zombie Taylor Swift. Truly a quartet of contemporary horrors. Halloween, it is safe to say, is not what it once was: in my day, a gentle bit of apple bobbing, turnip carving and maybe a white sheet with holes for eyes at a fancy-dress disco was about the full extent of it. Ghosts and ghouls, it seems, change their appearance depending on time and place.

As Susan Owens notes, in her The Ghost: A Cultural History, ‘ghosts are mirrors of the times’ and her purpose is to hold up these cracked, spooky and cobwebby mirrors for our delight and examination. (The book, it should be said, is beautifully — the usual term I believe is ‘richly’ — illustrated throughout.