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“... any political thinker has inspired more sustained imbecility among his friends and enemies than Edmund Burke. And, despite first appearances, his appeal is far less predictable than theirs. Both Aquinas and Marx were in the first place theoreticians: the latter died at his desk, the former should have done. Burke in ...”

“... you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen.’ Dr Johnson’s remark on Edmund Burke, related in one of Hester Thrale’s anecdotes, is unforgettable. The greatest Tory of the 18th century takes off his hat and makes the lowest possible bow to the much younger Irish Whig (Burke’s dates are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the ‘little platoons’ championed by their acknowledged forebear, the political philosopher Edmund Burke. One of the few intellectual stars on the Conservative backbenches, the free-range MP for Hereford, Jesse Norman, has published studies of The Big Society (2010) and of ...”

“... Bentham’s Collected Works is likely to produce more new or revised views than the publication of Burke’s Writings and Speeches: indeed, it has already done so. The Bentham project will also take longer, for the establishment of the text is a herculean task. Bentham left a vast archive of notes and of drafts and redrafts of works planned but not ...”

“... Mr Burke will live,’ declared the Times two days after he had died, ‘as long as strength of imagination and beauty of language shall be respected by the world.’ By the time the Oxford edition of Burke’s Select Works came out in 1876 there was more for the world to respect ...”

“... Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790. By then, Burke had long ceased to be the dominant intellectual influence in the Whig Party. He hoped the work would restore him to that position. Instead, it began the long process of his transformation into the patron saint of a later Toryism, rooted in nostalgia, in a feeling for the evolution rather than revolution of national structures, gradualist in reform, empirical rather than abstractly ideological, and moderate rather than extremist in its principles of political action ...”

“... I was writing for and told me there was ‘definitely’ no room. NatCon is the brainchild of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a think tank and campaign group based in Washington DC dedicated to ‘strengthening the principles of national conservatism’. What this means in practice can be hard to pin down. The foundation’s chairman is Yoram Hazony, an ...”

“... Edmund Burke, who spent most of his life either in the wilderness of Parliamentary opposition or as a champion of lost causes, knew how uncharitably we treat political failure. ‘The conduct of a losing party,’ he wrote, ‘never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments – success ...”

“... Revolution and particularly the Parisian mob to a parricidal monster may have occurred first to Edmund Burke. Already in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke saw the fomentors of revolutions as sinister magicians, the Parisian municipal army as ‘a species of political monster, which has always ...”

“... hijack of the Conservative Party, but signalled its ultimate provenance in the philosophy of Edmund Burke: ‘We respect the fact that society is a contract between the generations: a partnership between those who are living, those who have lived before us, and those who are yet to be born.’ This election was perhaps Britain’s best chance of ...”

“... it must be that The Principle of Duty puts the work of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Edmund Burke in the shade. The Principle of Duty not only fails to live up to its billing: it is quite dreadful. It is querulous and pompous, written in a sort of demented lawyer-speak, full of misreadings of the writers Selbourne criticises – and even of ...”

“... remains strong among some people that Boswell simply made his hero up. This can’t be true: Edmund Burke remarked that Johnson appeared greater in Boswell’s books than in his own, but he readily admitted, as did all of Johnson’s friends, that Boswell had, quite inexplicably but not unexpectedly, caught the living essence of the Johnson they had ...”

“... reappears in various forms elsewhere, in discussions of the Protestant Ascendancy and hegemony, of Edmund Burke and the Arnoldian appropriation of his peculiar version of cultural aesthetics and nationalism, of Gothic fiction and the intricate connections between the shapes of exile and of intimacy, of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and the Great ...”

“... Georgian political theatre at its best. The drama owed much of its intensity to its chief player, Edmund Burke, the leader of the prosecution. For four consecutive days, Burke held his audience transfixed with a speech detailing Hastings’s alleged rapacity, corruption, blackmail and worse. Transporting his listeners ...”