David Bromwich's portrait of statesman Edmund Burke (1730 1797) is the first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke s thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. The public and private writings cannot be easily dissociated, nor should they be. For Burke a thinker, writer, and politician the principles of politics were merely those of morality enlarged. Bromwich reads Burke s career as an imperfect attempt to...