"Linton offers a finely textured and compelling play-by-play, as figures like Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Georges Danton, Robespierre, and Jean Tallien wrestle over each other's fates and the future of France. Linton has given us a potent account of how individual revolutionaries faced the Terror." --Journal of Interdisciplinary History "As Linton points out in this fascinating study, the development of terrorist mentality among the Jacobian elite during the revolution was the first example of terror being used to defend explicitly deomcratic values. The broad lines of [the time period] are known but Linton's treatment of it is based on a close reading of a range of primary and secondary sources and contains a range of interesting insights, not least into several of the major political figures involved. Linton's book covers five years of the revolution and integrates a great deal of recent research into an interpretation of terror which will fascinate the general reader and encourage specialists to extend research into some of the areas she covers." --Dublin Review of Books "Linton argues brilliantly that in our quest to understand the still deeply divisive 'politicans' Terror', we are in fact left as the Jacobins were, that is, with 'the impossibility of knowing what anyone, friend or enemy, was really thinking'." --Modern & Contemporary France "Linton's rigorously researched and documented work renders in intricate detail the personalities, motives, and interrelationships of revolutionary figures caught up in the writing landscape of the great French political experiment." --CHOICE "Linton's chronological approach allows her to offer many insights into the politicians' personal experience of the Terror, and she is particularly strong on the subject of friendship.

" --French History "Marisa Linton's new book is in the best traditions of such careful, detailed, biographically-conscious evaluations. resolutely both biographical and contextual, refracting an impressive breadth of learning about the cultures of late 18th-century France." --Reviews in History.