A Magazine of Wisdom

Linda Colley

• Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature by Nicholas Robinson
  Yale, 214 pp, £30.00, October 1996, ISBN 0 300 06801 8
• The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. III: Party, Parliament and the American War 1774-80 edited by Warren Elofson and John Woods
  Oxford, 713 pp, £75.00, September 1996, ISBN 0 19 822414 1
• Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire by Frederick Whelan
  Pittsburgh, 384 pp, £39.95, December 1996, ISBN 0 8229 3927 4

Edmund Burke is easily the most significant intellectual in politics these islands ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century, J.S. Mill in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell this century. Nominated MP for Wendover in 1765, after becoming private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham who was then briefly prime minister, he remained in the Commons until 1794, three years before his death. For most of that time he was a leading opposition spokesman, ideologue and tactician.