Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is considered by many to be a masterpiece of political analysis and a compelling rationale against the French Revolution. Originally written as a letter in response to a young Parisian and later expanded upon and published in book format in January 1790, the work has greatly influenced conservative and classic liberal intellectuals and stands as a powerful argument against violent revolutions,...

In the bucolic mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, a young woman is found dead of a heroin overdose, her baby lying at her side. While this should be an open-and-shut drug case, restraint marks on the victim suggest to Probationary Constable Molly Smith and Sergeant John Winters that the death might not have been completely accidental.

Nicholas B. Dirks is Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom and the editor of Colonialism and Culture and In Near Ruins. He has taught at the University of Michigan, the California Institute of Technology, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale in Paris. When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common...

At The Center of Martin Chuzzlewit -- the novel Angus Wilson called "one of the most sheerly exciting of all Dickens stories"--Is Martin himself, very old, very rich, very much on his guard. What he suspects (with good reason) is that every one of Iris close and distant relations. now converging in droves on the country inn where they believe he is dying, will stop at nothing to become the inheritor of Iris great fortune. Having unjustly disinherited...

Rudolph Rassendyll, an English gentleman in a foreign land, where he masquerades as his cousin, the King, to save Ruritania from the vicious Duke of Strelsau.

At 9:45 p.m. on August 24, 1814, the British set fire to the White House and, within an hour, the Capitol had been gutted. How could this happen? The war was not widely supported and the defense of Washington had been placed in the hands of two inept and ill-appointed leaders―Secretary of War Armstrong and Brigadier General Winder―whose "thimble headed stupidity" meant that the arriving British troops met little resistance. There were heroes in...