A brilliant hour-by-hour recreation... He has a marvellous eye for colour: the sweat and fear in the Parisian prisons, the exhausted paranoia of the government committees, the stench of the guillotined bodies in the death pits outside the city. He is excellent on the contingency of political history... And, above all, he is brilliant on the psychology of politics, the way the mood of an assembly can switch in a moment with devastating consequences. * Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times *
Jones insists that to understand 9 Thermidor it's necessary to dig down to the level of infinitely small details. In his admirable account he meticulously reconstructs the day on an hour-by-hour basis, crisscrossing the city as he does so. * Gerard deGroot, The Times *
Colin Jones, a professor of history at Queen Mary University of London, handles a huge amount of material with skill and verve. He creates an extraordinarily vivid minute-by-minute portrait of Paris and its people on that pivotal day... * Constance Craig Smith, Daily Mail *
... minutely detailed and unfailingly gripping... Jones's superbly researched and strikingly original book produces an optic of a radically different kind. 'Only by getting up close and drilling down into the infinitely small details of the revolutionary process', its author insists, can the day's course and outcome be understood. And for once this counsel of perfection can be put into practice. * John Adamson, Literary Review *
Vital, incisive, revelatory, The Fall of Robespierre offers a crisis anatomised, 'by the map and by the clock.' Its close-focus intensity makes us question everything we thought we knew about the bloody events of Thermidor Year II. It takes us to the place, to the instant, to the heartbeat of revolution in the making. * Hilary Mantel, author A Place of Greater Safety and the Wolf Hall trilogy *
This is an astoundingly scholarly book, written with a beautifully assured hand... a book for the historian of the French Revolution itself... The minutiae of detail, and the ability to convey it, along with the mounting tension, is a specific talent, and which has been so obviously achieved by the author of this fascinating and superb volume. * Sandra Callard, On: Yorkshire Magazine *
