Mike Jay is a freelance journalist and cultural historian. He is author of many books including Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind; Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century; High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History, Science and Culture; Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic; This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond; and The Influencing Machine: James Tilly and the Air Loom. His website is https://mikejay.net/