Quotes by Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine

Explore a curated collection of 20 quotes by Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine. Discover timeless wisdom, insightful thoughts, and memorable words that have inspired readers around the world. Browse through the gallery below and click on any quote to read more.

The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporar — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
But, mad or sane, Matthews was a man of no ordinary persistence. He was not prepared to renounce the peace plan, any mor — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Come the revolution, however, mesmerism was reconceived once more. From its beginnings many had seen it as an aristocrat — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
We are now edging across the boundary - always a porous one - between self-justification and fantasy. Matthews' story is — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more. — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how thi — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater l — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
James Tilly Matthews was not a prophet. He was a gifted, perhaps fragile individual who suffered intensely, and for litt — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The French army had crowned a campaign of extraordinary successes by defeating the Austrians at Jemappes and pressing on — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining event. Yet as la — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
It was Matthews, of course, for whom the verdict was the greatest disaster. Not only had he failed to escape from Bedlam — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity as an exhausted and — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabo — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad was a tiny fraction — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognised immediately as a classic par — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long known in popular sl — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Matthews' shout of treason in the House was no random outburst of lunacy, but the last act in an astonishing adventure: — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The Air Loom had been constructed by the Jacobins in Paris around the time of their coup d'etat in 1793. Just as they ha — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Many had suspected that the political disasters of the past few years had a hidden cause. The bloodiness of the French m — Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine