Kate Summerscale is an award-winning British author and journalist, best known for her celebrated works of narrative non-fiction. Notably The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher and The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
After graduating from Oxford University with a double first, she went into newspaper journalism, becoming the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph in 2005. The Book of Phobias and Manias presents a fascinating and hugely entertaining history of our fears and obsessions from the Middle Ages to the modern day, establishing that however intimate we may consider them to be, they are all inter-connected in the age we are living through.
