As Bromwich says, "The portrait of Burke as an anti-theoretical critic of modern politics, a ‘pragmatic' adapter to local needs, has always been overdrawn. The truth is that he cherished certain abstract ideals unconditionally." Bromwich is committed, in a responsively Burkean way, both to recovering those unconditional commitments and to tracing the sometimes sinous path Burke trod in the attempt to make those commitments operative in politics.

In Burke's quest to understand ever more completely what it might mean for true politics and enlarged morality to be coordinated, language was more than just a medium.  As Bromwich points out, for Burke writing and speaking were forms of action, and the consequence is that, for him, language was a means not just of presentation and persuasion, but also of political discovery: "Shakespeare can awaken new thoughts by the force and patience of words; and Burke is the writer of English prose who suggests a similar intuition and command."

A frequent emphasis in the radical ripostes published in the early 1790s to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, such as those written by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine, is that Burke had no consistency as a political thinker. In the 1790s with his attacks on revolutionary France he had emerged as a defender of monarchy and the hereditary principle; but previously (as in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents) he had been acutely critical of the growing influence of the British Crown under Bute and George III. In the 1770s and 1780s Burke had been the advocate of the American colonists and had urged Britain towards policies of peace and conciliation, but in the 1790s he had become the unappeasable enemy of the French revolutionaries and the unflinching spokesman for a regicide war to be pursued à l'outrance. The passage of less than a decade had transformed (so it seemed to the radicals) the indignant champion of the Indians suffering under the despotic administration of the East India Company into an apologist for Europe's ancien régime who had nothing but indifference for the hardships imposed on the French people by an absolute monarchy.

Those were telling and effective blows then, and even now they raise stubbornly important questions for the interpretation of Burke's writings and his character as a political thinker. Bromwich's biography promises to be the fullest and most responsibly sensitive account of both Burke's consistency and his ductility that we will ever have. What he reveals is, to be sure, not immobility — Bromwich is scrupulous to underline those moments when something Burke says jars with something else he has said. So, for instance, Bromwich rightly underlines the challenge Burke's early writings on the sublime pose to what would become the cardinal premises of his later political writings:

The truth is that Burke's idea of the sublime cannot be incorporated with society in any way. Society depends on custom and habit, but a custom or habit of the sublime, if one could conceive of such a thing, would mean an end of the self or an end of society.