A provocative biography of Edmund Burke, the underappreciated founder of modern conservatism. Edmund Burke is both the greatest and the most underrated political thinker of the past three hundred years. A brilliant 18th-century Irish philosopher and statesman, Burke was a fierce champion of human rights and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, and a lifelong campaigner against arbitrary power. Once revered by an array of great Americans including...

"Soldier of fortune, spy, courtier, social reformer, minister of state, philanthropist, scientist, and inventor, [Thompson] rose from the obscurity of rural colonial Massachusetts to positions of power and influence in the courts of England, Bavaria, and France.... Sanborn Brown has spent several decades tracking down the documentary records of Rumford's career, and now after many articles and an edition of Rumford's collected works he has chosen...

From mud tracks on a quiet country road to dirt specks on the soles of walking boots, forensic ecologist Patricia Wiltshire uses her decades of scientific expertise to find often-overlooked clues left behind by criminal activity. She detects evidence and eliminates hypotheses armed with little more than a microscope, eventually developing a compelling thesis of the who, what, how, and when of a crime. Wiltshire's remarkable accuracy has made her one...