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I took my first degree at Peterhouse, Cambridge, of which I was a Scholar, and won university prizes in Classics and Literature. I next became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and obtained a Ph.D. in History of Political Thought. I came to Leicester in 1989. At various times, I have been a Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Oxford, a Visiting Fellow at Yale, and a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (amongst other places). I have held research awards from the AHRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Scouloudi Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. On the local scene, I have done a wide variety of administrative jobs at university, faculty/college (including Associate Dean), and school/departmental level, which have focussed variously on admissions (both postgraduate and undergraduate), study abroad, Health & Safety and the role of Academic Conduct Officer.

My academic writing spans a very wide range of topics. It has run from Plato to the twenty-first century. It focusses on texts and also on the wider world of which they and their authors are part. Political thought is at the centre of these concerns, whether as situated in thought more broadly or as situated in the politics of the day. This work tends to cross period boundaries (I have pursued history of political thought from c.1600 to the twenty-first century) and disciplinary ones too (I have published about International Relations, the American constitution, Biography, Textual Criticism and Historiography as well as History of Political Thought). My especial interests are in connecting political thought with other sorts of thought and with political practice, the latter reconstructed especially from manuscript sources. My research is focussed at present on Edmund Burke. Recent publications include ‘What was Parliamentary Reporting?’ and ‘The Authentication of Burke’s Reflections: Church, Monarchy and Universities’ (which runs to some 25000 words).

The Mind of John Locke. A study of political theory in its intellectual setting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994: pp.xv + 429; revised edition, 1998)

Edmund Burke: Pre-Revolutionary Writings, edited with introductions and notes (Cambridge University Press, 1993: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought: pp.lxxvi + 328). Chinese edition, 2002.

ed., jointly,  Plato  (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly, Aristotle  (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly, Augustine  (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly,  Aquinas   (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly,  Machiavelli   (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly, More  (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly, Grotius  (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly, Hobbes  (3 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly,  Locke  (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

ed., jointly,  Hume   (2 vols., Elgar: Aldershot, 1997)

Selected Articles

‘Order and Justice in The Anarchical Society’, International Affairs, 69, 4(1993), pp.725-741.

‘Paine and Burke: God, Nature and Politics’, in Michael Bentley, ed., Public and Private Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.34-62; reprinted in Bruce Kuklick, ed., Paine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

‘The Politics of Christianity’ in G.A.J. Rogers, ed., John Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp.197-215.

‘The Adventures of William Godwin’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 3, 2(1995), pp.214-241.

‘Locke’s Political Theory’ in Stuart C. Brown, ed. The Routledge History of Philosophy: Volume Five, British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.96-122

‘Rousseau and Burke’, in Stuart C. Brown, ed., The Routledge History of Philosophy: Volume Five, British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.354-395

‘Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty’, in M.G. Forsyth and H.M.A. Keens-Soper, eds., The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.121-142

‘Professor Dworkin, the American Constitution, and a third way’, Cambridge Law Journal, 57, 2(1998), pp.284-300.

‘Three Ways to Read the American Constitution’, Amicus Curiae. Journal of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies, no.17 (1999), pp.21-22.

‘Philosophie politique en Grand Bretagne’, Cités: Philosophie, Politique, Histoire, 2 (2000), pp.209-224

‘Locke on Justice’ in Oxford Studies in the History of Philosophy, 2: English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M.A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp.46-85

‘In defence of Berlin’, Times Literary Supplement, 5149 (7 December 2001), 15

‘Berlin and his Critics’ in Isaiah Berlin, Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 and frequently reprinted and revised), pp.349-65

‘Tolérance, église et état chez Locke’ in Yves Charles Zarka, Franck Lessay and John Rogers, eds., Les fondements philosophiques de la tolérance (3 vols., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), vol. i, pp.175-218

‘The Case of the Suffering Clergy of France: a study in bibliography, history and textual criticism’, Yale University Library Gazette 79, 3-4 (April, 2005), pp.103-18

L’idée de communauté: Hobbes et Kant’, in Luc Foisneau and Denis Thouard, eds., Kant et Hobbes: politiques de la raison (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), pp.62-85

‘Publishing Parliamentary Oratory: The Case of Edmund Burke’ Parliamentary History, 26, 1 (2007), pp.113-28.

‘”Rien qu’un serviteur eminent de l’Etat”: royauté et corps politique dans la guerre civil’ in Yves Charles Zarka, ed., Monarchie et republique au siecle xviie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), pp.127-67.

‘Toleration and its Place: A Study of Pierre Bayle in his Commentaire Philosophique’, in Sarah Hutton and Paul Schurmann, eds., Studies on Locke: sources, contemporaries, and legacy (The Hague: Springer, 2008), pp.225-43.

‘La loi naturelle chez le jeune Locke’, in L.-L. Christians, F.Coppens, X.Dijon, P.Favraux, G.Fiasse, J-M Longneaux, M.Ruol, eds., Droit naturel (Brussels : Bruylant, 2008), pp.379-429.

‘The Anglican Mind of Maurice Cowling’, Robert Crowcroft, Simon Green and Richard Whiting, eds., The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (London: Tauris, 2010), ch.9, pp.223-269

‘Some Origins of a Tudor Revolution’, English Historical Review 126, 533 (2011), 1355-1385

‘John Locke and Natural Law: Free Worship and Toleration’, Proceedings of the British Academy 186 (2013) = Jon Parkin and Timothy Stanton, eds., Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford, 2013), pp.59-105

‘Some Reflexions on Critical-Text Editing’, Locke Studies 16(2016), 215-271

‘What was Parliamentary Reporting? A Study of Aims and Results in the London Daily Newspapers 1780-1796’, Parliamentary History 39, 2(2020), 255-275

‘The Authentication of Burke’s Reflections: Church, Monarchy and Universities, 1790-1791’,

History of Political Thought, 43, 1(2022), 81-130

‘Edmund Burke’ in Edward N. Zalta, et al., eds., Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (online only: at

Ph.D. theses supervised have included:- Three Concepts of Liberty; The Political Thought of John Locke and Edward Stillingfleet; Unbinding Order in History: Conscience and the Public Good in the Thought of Roger Williams; and The Concept of Relation in Classical Islamic Philosophy.

I have taught a wide range of modules in both History and Politics at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, including American history, gender history, group projects, literary history, feminist theory, international theory, political theory, research methods and philosophy of social sciences.

I convene or have convened recently:

• HS1013 - Modern Britain
• HS2307 - Madness, Monarchy and Politics from George III to Queen Victoria
• HS3505/6 - Dissertation
• PL2011 - Political Ideas

Besides lecturing on these, often extensively, I teach or have taught recently:

• HS1000 - Making History
• HS1001 - Medieval and Early Modern History
• HS2401 - Perceiving the Past
• HS7010 - Historical Research, Historical Writing
• PL1019 - Introduction to Politics
• PL3094/5 - Dissertation

I have published in a range of popular journals, including Amicus Curiae and Politics Review. My essay on Burke in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has attracted over forty-seven thousand readers. I have addressed the Friends of Northumberland Archives on ‘What the Guild Knew. Politics and Information in Berwick-upon-Tweed in the later eighteenth century’.

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• Scholar, Peterhouse, Cambridge
• University Prizes in Classics, Literature &c
• University Scholarship in Ecclesiastical History
• Fellowship, Jesus College Cambridge
• Visiting Scholar, St. John’s College, Cambridge
• Leverhulme Research Fellowship
• Visiting Fellow, Yale University Library (Beinecke Library and Lewis Walpole Library)
• AHRC Research Award
• Visiting Fellow, National Maritime Museum
• Visiting Fellow, Huntington Library
• British Academy Small Personal Grants
• Scouloudi Foundation Grants
• Wellcome Trust Grant

• B.A., M.A., Ph.D. University of Cambridge
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy