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