Richard Bourke provides a major reinterpretation of Edmund Burke, rescuing him from partisan appropriation by reconstructing his thought within its proper historical context. Burke is typically remembered as a conservative who defended tradition against revolutionary change, but Bourke shows that this image reflects selective reading and subsequent interpretation more than Burke's actual concerns. The book traces Burke's engagement with the major issues of his time: the governance of British India, where he spent years investigating colonial corruption; American independence, which he supported as consistent with British constitutional principles; European wars and reform in Britain; and the French Revolution, which he famously opposed. Bourke examines how Burke's positions on these issues formed a coherent philosophical outlook concerned with the conditions for legitimate political authority. He shows that Burke was neither simply conservative nor liberal but developed nuanced positions that defy modern political categories. The book places Burke within eighteenth-century debates about empire, commerce, and representation, revealing an intellectual more complex and interesting than the icon either venerated or dismissed by subsequent political movements. Bourke's Burke is a thinker worth engaging rather than a symbol to be invoked.