Writing Politics

David Bromwich is one of the most clear-headed, learned, well-informed, cogent, and uncompromising political writers of our day, a man who is firmly but never dogmatically on the left whose work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics and the author of an intellectual biography of Edmund Burke that has received glowing reviews. Bromwich's new gathering of political essays dates back to the beginning of the modern political world the better to illuminate some of the central political debates that continue to shape our world but also to bring out some of the finest writing that political passion has given rise to. This is a book not just about political power but about the power of the word. Essays by Edmund Burke, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, and Elizabeth Hardwick are included, along with a wide-ranging introduction by Bromwich.