(…) His first book, Common Sense, written in 1775, was taken by the American leaders of what became their Revolution – especially George Washington – as a summons that it was their duty to throw off the colonial yoke.

His next publication, The Rights of Man (1791), had, like Common Sense, startling success, and also attacked the English constitution. It sold more copies than the Bible and it turned the British government against him.

In his third book, The Age of Reason he dismantled the Bible stories with a ferocity of reason which again infused the imagination of an immense audience.

(…)

He was far ahead of his time. “When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy… my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive… then may that country boast its constitution and its government.”

But yet again he attacked those who had elevated him. He objected to all capital punishment including the execution of the King and Queen of France. The French threw him out of Parliament and into prison, where he just escaped the guillotine.

(…)

He died in America in 1809, having been given a small pension by a few of his friends. Even fewer turned up – six – at his funeral.

"An illiterate mechanic, when mistaking some disturbance of his nerves for a miraculous call proceeds alone to convert a tribe of savages, whose language he can have no natural means of acquiring, may have been misled by impulses very different from those of high self opinion ; but the illiterate perpetrator of " the Age of Reason," must have had his very conscience stupefied by the habitual intoxication of presumptuous arrogance, , and his common sense over-clouded by the vapours of his head"

Coleridge on Paine and his ilk.