  It is clear by now that neither ‘mystic spirit’ nor ‘irrationalism’ characterise Burke helpfully. These examples might be taken as extreme. At the same time they witness interpretative difficulties. Whilst Burke's thought has never lacked interpreters from his own day to ours, on the whole they have not brought to bear the combined persistence of historical insight and strength of conceptual grasp required to do justice to him. Hence he has suffered an ironic fate for one who urged breadth and precision of thought. That is to say, he has figured as the spokesman for a very limited number of points or as one preoccupied with a limited number of themes. This type of treatment began in the nineteenth century, when Burke was invoked as an antidote to the confidence of the French Revolution by liberal thinkers who prized its principles, saw their narrowness, and required a sense of historical development to situate them properly in a viable civil society. It was continued when Matthew Arnold tried to treat Burke as a (pre-Home Rule) Gladstonian spokesman about Ireland. It went further still in the twentieth century, when Burke was pressed into service as a counter-revolutionary agent in the anti-Communist cause, and when the twenty-first dawned some were treating Burke as proponent of postmodernism. He himself could hardly have complained that his work has been put to practical use, but it remains true that academic justice has yet to be done to him. Chapters and essays on individual themes in his writings have been more plausible on the whole than attempts at general interpretation, which usually concentrate on a theme or themes of choice, or subordinate Burke's thought to it or them, and so give the impression (deliberately or otherwise) that this is the whole of Burke, or at any rate that this is what matters about him. One response to this situation is to concentrate primarily on telling the story, and it is interesting that a number of recent works have taken this path.