"Baker's nine-hundred-page biography of Jean-Paul Marat, the journalist turned revolutionary who went on to orchestrate the Terror, is both a fascinating character study and a sweeping history of the period. Baker's achievement is to show how a combination of resentment, petty grievance, and the radical mood of the cosmopolitan world of the late eighteenth century came together in Marat to form a deeply paranoid, conspiratorial man. Baker's is a perfect bedside book for anyone wanting to understand the origins of Jacobinism and to make sense of one of its most fascinating figures."

"A monument of sparkling erudition that brilliantly achieves the daunting task of understanding the most contentious and unsympathetic of French Revolutionaries as a man rather than as a monster. Beautifully written, profoundly researched, and impressively and lucidly argued, Jean-Paul Marat is a biography for the ages."-- "Colin Jones, emeritus, Queen Mary University of London"

"This is a monumental and definitive biography. Through his expert knowledge and gripping, clear writing, Baker has developed a brilliant political portrait of one of the most important revolutionaries in modern history."-- "David Bell, Princeton University"

"Jean-Paul Marat is a dramatic story of political delusion, that concludes--in the diptych of Condorcet and Marat--in a moving and eloquent alternate vista of reason, sympathy, and the possibility of liberal society."-- "Emma Rothschild, Harvard University"

"An astounding work of scholarship that will be valued by French Revolution scholars for decades. Following the complicated life of Jean-Paul Marat from beginning to end, it is at once a rich analysis of his thought and an extraordinarily detailed history of the actions, beliefs, and struggles that constituted the fraught daily politics of the French Revolution."-- "William H. Sewell Jr, University of Chicago"