Edmund Burke: de eerste conservatief

He was the first modern conservative thinker, and one of the most penetrating and complete political philosophers to have written in English. It is this aspect of the great Whig that captivates Jesse Norman, his brilliant biographer – and incidentally, the Conservative MP for Hereford.

Jesse’s book falls open in two neat halves. The first part deals with Burke’s life: his rise from bourgeois obscurity (he spoke all his life with a strong Dublin accent); his travails with the Electors of Bristol who, after his homily about being their representative and not their delegate, declined to re-elect him; his efforts on behalf of the American colonists; his assaults on the East India Company nabobs – eighteenth-century equivalents of today’s too-big-to-fail bankers. Jesse manages to fit everything that matters into a few short chapters without any sense of being rushed or crowded.