“But, mad or sane, Matthews was a man of no ordinary persistence. He was not prepared to renounce the peace plan, any more than he would be prepared to renounce his madness a few years later. A mont...”

“Come the revolution, however, mesmerism was reconceived once more. From its beginnings many had seen it as an aristocratic fad: Mesmer (by this stage long gone to Germany and Switzerland) had made ...”

“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 ...”

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

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

“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.”

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our li...”

“Because I always feel like runningNot away, because there is no such placeBecause if there was, I would have found it by nowBecause it's easier to run,Easier than staying and finding out you're the...”

“The paths carved by the divine carpenter into her palms are actually treasure maps showing the way to heaven.”

“Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.”

“Memories of lost love they do enpain,Fleeting images of what once was never again to gain.Hold tight those memories that slip through the mind, To walk in those fields again with hera dream divi...”

“As she left the cold arena Angel had to laugh,Beaten by that of a wisp girl and her subliming cunning craft.Jove lay silent in his orbit; brooding, deep, dreamless forweep,And faithful dog Sirius r...”

“Don't just stand there and nod. The mind observes and cogitates, the heart engages, and I would encourage you to engage with the process.”

“The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shado...”

“The unconscious no sooner touches us than we are itwe become unconscious of ourselves. That is the age-old danger, instinctively known and feared by primitive man, who himself stands so very close ...”