The most important works of Edmund Burke, the greatest political thinker of the past three centuries, are gathered here in one comprehensive volume. Accompanying his influential masterpiece,  Reflections on the Revolution in France , is a selection of pamphlets, speeches, public letters, private correspondence and, for the first time, two important and previously uncollected early essays.   Philosopher, statesman, and founder of conservatism, Burke was a dazzling orator and a visionary theorist who spent his long political career fighting abuses of power. He wrote at a time of great change, against the backdrop of the revolt of the American colonies, the expansion of the British Empire, the collapse of Ireland, and the French Revolution. Burke argued passionately in support of the American revolutionaries and in equally impassioned opposition to the horrors of the unfolding French Revolution. Making a case for upholding established rights and customs, and advocating incremental reform rather than radical revolutionary change, Burke’s writings have profoundly influenced modern democracies up to the present day. Edited and Introduced by Jesse Norman. EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797) was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher, who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig Party. JESSE NORMAN is a British Conservative politician who is the Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire. Before that he was a director at Barclays before leaving to research and teach philosophy at University College London. He is the author of Compassionate Conservatism, Living for the City, The Big Society, and the biography Edmund Burke: Politician, Philosopher, Prophet, which was longlisted for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, once summarized Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph’. The same might be said of the great eighteenth-century philosopherstatesman Edmund Burke.   Edmund Burke was born, probably in 1730, on the banks of the Liffey in Dublin, the third of four children. His father was a solicitor, a difficult man described in an age before class analysis as of ‘the middling sort’, who practised in the superior courts, and a Protestant. His mother was calmer and kinder, and a Catholic. She came from a distinguished family, the Nagles of County Cork, Jacobites who had supported the claims of James II and his successors after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, in which James went into exile and William III came to the throne amid a new constitutional settlement – a cause which had cost them both lands and grandeur.   Ireland at that time was in name a Kingdom, but in reality an English and Protestant dominion, in which the rights of Catholics were severely curtailed by the so-called Popery Laws. It was a place of huge disparities of wealth and wellbeing, compounding and in turn compounded by intense religious hatreds and political instability. It offered rich material for Burke’s vivid moral and literary imagination, and for what proved to be his lifelong detestation of injustice.   Burke was educated first at a non-denominational school outside Dublin (1741–4), and then at Trinity College Dublin (1744–8). At school he was inspired by the intellectual and moral example of his schoolmaster, Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker and the father of his first great friend and early correspondent, Richard Shackleton. He was less enthused by Trinity, it seems, finding the teaching laborious and pedantic; his outlets lay elsewhere, in two short-lived literary societies which he helped to found, in three hours a day in the public library, and in poetry and other writing.   We know relatively little of Burke over the following seven years. He seems to have worked in his father’s office, before arriving at the Middle Temple in London in May 1750 to read for the Bar, aged twenty. He had a year or two of ill-health and low spirits, which he sought to cure through extended journeys with his friend (but not it seems, relative) Will Burke. In 1755, to his father’s apparent displeasure, he took the momentous decision to leave the law and try to live by his pen.   There followed an extraordinary burst of writing, sustained by the financial support and literary access given to Burke by Robert Dodsley, a noted publisher and bookseller. His wideranging early works included an almost too sophisticated parody, the literary polemic A Vindication of Natural Society ; a highly influential work of aesthetics, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ; a social and historical survey, An Account of the European Settlements in America in collaboration with Will Burke; and An Essay towards an Abridgment of the English History , which broke off wi