
This is a lengthy, thorough, well-written and impressive achievement of a book. Richard Bourke’s greatest force lies maybe in the fact that he takes Burke seriously, and that he tries to re-construct the coherence behind his political thinking (from the advocate of the American rebellion to the defender of the Indians’ rights against Hastings and the East India Company to the counter-revolutionary author of the Reflections on the Revolution of France) and in so doing provides us with a heretofore missing insight into the mind of what was perhaps the greatest political thinker of his generation. Bourke’s bibliography is extensive and seemingly exhaustive.
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In proposing a biography of the most famous Irish revolutionary, Theobald Wolfe Tone, Marianne Elliott displays her formidable research skills, and succeeds in proposing an account of the man far from the nationalist legend that grew up in the 19th century. However, she does not really replace the man in his late 18th-century context. In this regard, her biography of Tone is less satisfying than her seminal Partners in Revolution.
Joanna Innes, Mark Philp, Re-inventing Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750-1850, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.
Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the late Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke & London, 1992, 251 p.