The works of Edmund Burke, an 18th-century British politician and political writer, are no longer as widely read as they should be. Here's hoping a fine new biography by Jesse Norman, an academic philosopher and a Conservative member of the U.K. Parliament, will help put that right.
As Norman explains in "Edmund Burke: The First Conservative," his subject was not just an engaging man and an unusually deep thinker for his time. He has good answers to questions that politics still poses two and a half centuries later.
You couldn't call Burke's political career a success. He spent decades in Parliament, but held executive office only briefly. He's remembered for a series of essays, letters and pamphlets on the great issues of his day. He argued in support of the American colonists on the eve of the Revolutionary War. Most famously, he warned that the French Revolution carried the seeds of social and moral ruin. Events proved him right on both counts, and on many others as well.