Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the son of a Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother. After Trinity College, Dublin, he went to London to study law but turned to letters and philosophy, and at twenty-eight published his celebrated treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. At thirty-six he entered the House of Commons, where he served nearly thirty years as a Whig member and was the most eloquent orator of his time. He sympathised with the American colonies and opposed the government's harsh policy towards them; he fought for the rights of Irish Catholics; he spent more than ten years impeaching Warren Hastings, the East India Company's governor in India, for misrule. Yet when the French Revolution broke out he attacked it fiercely, and posterity has called him the father of modern conservatism.