Monumental...a brilliant biography... Jonathan Israel has more than done justice to this ultimately elusive genius * Daniel Johnson, The Critic * Definitive * Andrew Robinson, Nature * This biography is a worthy conclusion to Israel's immense Enlightenment project. * Michiel Leezenberg, NRC Handelsblad * This monumental work should be added to the short list of modern biographies of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77)...Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty * Choice * Israel has done a great deal to illuminate Spinoza's unwavering rationalism, drawing out its revolutionary implications and charting its clandestine dissemination and profound impact on European thought. * Carlos Fraenkel, Times Literary Supplement * [A] tour-de-force... [a] meticulous survey of Spinoza's background, the Dutch political history, and his intellectual life in the seventeenth century. * Nicholas Morton, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books * With the publication of Spinoza, Life and Legacy, Israel has given us a book as vast as Spinoza's god... Israel, astonishingly prolix, passionate, and exhaustive, has created around Spinoza a vast fresco of an era, densely populated with characters, genealogies, situations, ideas, episodes, and conflicts. * Enrique Krauze, Project Syndicate *