We are now edging across the...

We are now edging across the boundary - always a porous one - between self-justification and fantasy. Matthews' story is by no means a complete fantasy: we can recognise every event. But the frame of reference is somehow shrinking, and momentous world events being rewritten around the actions of a minor player.

- Mike Jay

A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine

biography history psychology

Other quotes by Mike Jay

Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.

- Mike Jay

The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong.

- Mike Jay

If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.

- Mike Jay

James Tilly Matthews was not a prophet. He was a gifted, perhaps fragile individual who suffered intensely, and for little if any reward.

- Mike Jay

The French army had crowned a campaign of extraordinary successes by defeating the Austrians at Jemappes and pressing on to occupy a large swathe of Belgium and threaten Holland. For Britain, this changed everything: a French republic that spread across the North Sea coast meant the entire coastline facing Britain would be in Republican hands.

- Mike Jay

We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining event. Yet as late as halfway through 1792, most of the familiar images of the revolution had yet to occur. Louis XVI was still king, and the Assembly was negotiating a new constitutional arrangement for the monarchy, not so different from Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688.

- Mike Jay

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