Gentle Regrets

by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is Britain's best-known intellectual dissident, who has defended English traditions and English identity against an official culture of denigration. Although his writings on philosophical aesthetics have shown him to be a leading authority in the field, his defence of political conservatism has marked him out in academic circles as Public Enemy Number One.
Contrary to orthodox opinion, however, Roger Scruton is a human being, and Gentle Regrets contains the proof of it - a quiet, witty but also serious and moving account of the ways in which life brought him to think what he thinks, and to be what he is. His moving vignettes of his childhood and later influences illuminate this book.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Autobiography, Ebooks, Cultural

Hardcover

First published May 10, 2006

About the author

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.

In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.

In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).

Reviews

[David Huff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy Roger Scruton's writing (even when he goes so deep, on occasion, that I have to swim hard to follow him), and this volume is one of his easier reads. The first half of the book contains a story, in each chapter, of a significant event or experience in Scruton's life: his childhood, his discovery of books, his coming to understand his own name, his journey to conservatism, and others.

The second half includes various vignettes of his life's travels to a number of places in Europe, as well as his thoughts on architecture, music, and religion, among other topics. Had this been a standard autobiography of his life, I'd have included a fifth star, but his first person perspective on some aspects of his life, and some of the events that have impacted it, still made for good reading. Scruton is a deep thinker, and whether one agrees with him on every point of view, he is still well able to cause the reader to think deeply also.

[Harooon · Rating 2 out of 5]

(This is a review of both Gentle Regrets and Conversations with Roger Scruton)

For no particular reason, bored of not being able to communicate with my Polish co-workers beyond a smattering of broken Dutch, I downloaded two biographies of Roger Scruton from Library Genesis to read on my lunch-breaks.

They were good picks. Conversations with Roger Scruton is an easy read, taking the form of questions put by Mark Dooley to Roger Scruton, who then discusses and expands upon them. Some of the questions are about Scruton’s life, others about his philosophy. It’s a slightly ugly, didactic style, but functions as a good introduction to Scruton’s thinking.

Gentle Regrets, on the other hand, was a more uneven read. It is ostensibly a biography, but an untidy one, with no unifying progression. Some chapters are diary entries, some are reflections on growing up, others are stand-alone essays. The writing can be a bit rambly, and has a literary sheen that I often found distracting—even while acknowledging that the inseparability of literature, art, and life is central to Scruton’s philosophical project.

Scruton’s love of books came early, thanks to a chance encounter at age 13. His family had moved into a new house. The old owners were heading overseas. They were a retired couple. They lived with their nearly 40 year old son Ivor:

He was a bachelor of 40 years, still living with his parents. His face was pale and thin, with grey eyes that seemed to fade away when you looked at them. His alabaster hands with their long white fingers; his quiet voice; his spare and careful words; his trousers, rubbed shiny at the knees; and his Adam’s apple shifting up and down like a ping-pong ball in a fountain – all these seemed totally out of place in our suburb and conferred on him an air of suffering fragility that must surely have some literary cause. (GR 7)

Ivor had to leave his books behind. Scruton inherited an impressive collection which included Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Decline of the West, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

From Nietszche, Scruton got his aesthetic-philosophical view, a way of rendering life intelligible by viewing it as a kind of judgement of beauty. He was also taken by Nietszche’s arguments against pity, though later changed his mind after witnessing a disabled bookkeeper struggling to carry a box of books from his car. Scruton felt not only pity, but admiration—the feeling was, to him, a sufficient refutation of Nietszche.

From Spengler he obtained a sense that cultural life is precarious and at risk of being lost:

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be – though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain – because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will be gone.

Spengler argued that history was cyclical, that civilisations rise and fall, and that this process repeats. That this was a truth that could not be established on scientific terms was, for Scruton, an exhilarating idea, “a proof that the real truths, those we understand and accept in the life-process itself, are inaccessible to scientific method.” (GR 37)

I was surprised to learn that Scruton’s early interests were mostly in maths and science. It was not until he got to Cambridge that Scruton decided on philosophy, which was then called “moral sciences”, and included a large component of what we now call psychology. He made this decision largely because he had already studied the first year of the science curriculum and didn’t want to repeat it!

For the crime of getting into Cambridge, his father Jack Scruton kicked his class traitor son out of home. The family was of rough, working-class origins, materially impoverished, but spiritually stalwart. Jack Scruton was fiercely proud of his roots and his background. He wanted an English socialism in his socialist England:

His socialism was not the forward-looking, theory-driven machine that purred in our universities, waiting the countdown to zero. It was a homegrown local product, which had home-growing and local production as its aims. Its roots were in the Anglo-Saxon moots and witenagemots, in scutage and gavelkind, in the Peasants’ Revolt and the Statute of Labourers, in Piers Plowman, Tyndale’s Bible, and Everyman. My father’s goal was not the classless society of the Marxists, but the tranquil order of the English country town, the order described by Thomas Hardy. (GR 257)

Jack Scruton was a domineering man, prone to brooding in silence for days on end like a “ball of electricity” before sudden explosions of anger. Everyone in the home developed a wall around themselves. They did this to avoid the wrath of Jack Scruton, but in the process also made themselves emotionally remote and inaccessible to each other. Going to Cambridge was an opportunity for Roger to escape this unhappy arrangement.

Cambridge had been the home of philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein who lead the “linguistic turn” in British philosophy away from the Idealism of the 19th century. They envisaged philosophy as being primarily about linguistic analysis and conceptual clarity, a kind of hunter-killer pairing with science.

Given Scruton’s early enthusiasm for the sciences and his philosophical training at Cambridge, one might have expected him to follow in the footsteps of the logical positivists and the analytic philosophers. Yet he saw science as an incomplete picture of reality, and longed for the understanding of human experience that was attempted by the continentals with their blend of literature and philosophy.

Mark Dooley quotes an interesting passage in Philosophy: Principles and Problems in which Scruton challenges the view that holds science as supreme:

[Science] leads us from the observed event to the laws which govern it, and onwards to higher and more general laws. But where does the process end? If each new answer prompts another question then scientific explanations are either incomplete or endless... But in that case science leaves at least one question unanswered. We still don’t know why the series of causes exists.... Even if we conclude that the universe began at a certain time from nothing, there is something else that needs to be explained, namely, the ‘initial conditions’ which then obtained. Something was true of the universe at time zero, namely that this great event was about to erupt into being, and to generate effects in accordance with laws that were already, at this initial instant, sovereign. And what is the why of that? A positivist would dismiss such a question as meaningless. So too would many scientists. But if the only grounds for doing so is that science cannot answer it, then the response is self-serving. Of course the question has no scientific answer: it is the question beyond science, the question left over when all of science has been written down. It is a philosophical question. (CWRS 23)

Clearly science could not—was never meant to—explain all the great mysteries of the human condition. On questions of morality, religion, beauty, and consolation, it can only look away—and for Scruton, these are the most essential matters of being human.

With his renewed sense of life and philosophy as aesthetic projects, Scruton set out from England to be a writer. It’s hard to imagine an arch-conservative as a starving bohemian artist, but that’s what he was. He hitchhiked to Greece, spent a few weeks convalescing in Egypt, and stayed in Rome and Paris for extended periods, where he boarded with several writers, thinkers, intellectuals, and counter-culturals.

In Paris, he fell in with a crowd that included Armand Gatti, a practitioner of Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty”. The Theatre of Cruelty was a surrealist practice that sought to liberate man’s primitive subconscious, long suppressed by the capitalist mode of existence. It achieved this through performances that contained spontaneous acts of violence, destruction, and confrontation (cruelty), which were to form the basis of a new theatrical “language” that was halfway between speech and action.

Gatti’s followers took part in the May ‘68 uprising. Students rioted and occupied parts of Paris, bringing the whole country to a halt. President Charles de Gaulle even left the country in secret, lest a civil war should break out. From his window, Roger Scruton observed what was happening in the streets:

In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground... The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a barricade against the next van-load of policeman. (GR 48)

As he watched the rioters overturning and burning cars and clashing with police, Scruton felt a surge of anger rise within him:

What, I asked, do you propose to put in place of this ‘bourgeoisie’ whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? (GR 50).

Thus, the two strands of his philosophical work—aesthetic and political—were woven together on the burning streets of Paris. In that moment, Roger Scruton knew he was a conservative. He saw how the two might reinforce or encourage each other, and returned to England to develop a philosophical conservatism that could account for and defend things like beauty and culture.

Scruton took up a professorship at Birkbeck. This was a pretty unlikely place to develop an intellectual basis for conservatism: “Birkbeck was traditionally a left-wing place, haunted by the fear that somewhere, somehow, a conservative might have infiltrated its corridors.” (CWRS 44). Academic life was dominated by a group of Marxist historians and philosophers, including Eric Hobsbawm, who was later appointed President of Birkbeck in 2002. As far as Scruton could tell, the only person who shared his conservative instincts was Nunzia, the old Neapolitan lady in the kitchen who liked to plaster her workstation with kitschy photos of John Paul II.

During his time away, Scruton’s hometown of High Wycombe was undergoing many changes. A quaint old market town, its Georgian terraces, medieval alleyways, Victorian pubs, and worskhops were being demolished for concrete apartment blocks and glass office buildings. In speaking against this, Scruton found an unlikely ally: his father. While never fully reconciling their differences, Jack Scruton, a skilled and passionate local organiser, formed a temporary alliance with his son to protect the England he loved:

Jack Scruton was awakened from the paralysed gloom in which he had been plunged by my mother’s death. He looked out from his solitude at what was happening beyond the window of the living room (which had been her dying room) and declared uncompromising war on it. (GR 258)

This experience formed the basis of his 1979 book The Aesthetics of Architecture. Key to Scruton’s architectural philosophy is the idea of a “vernacular architecture”. Architecture is not just a matter of personal taste or private opulence, but is the manifestation of a shared life. A vernacular architecture encourages the use of certain ornaments, decorations, and materials on buildings so, through recurring motifs and patterns, the buildings in a town may harmonise with each other.

Modernist architecture, in pursuing the ideal that “form follows function”, saw no place for decorative pieces. It de-emphasised the use of patterns and exalted the individual architect for his personal vision. It was followed in its turn by postmodern architecture, which emphasised horizontally sprawling, unbounded shapes that refused any limits or attempts to harmonise with their surroundings. The pinnacle of postmodern architecture, Scruton reckons, was the Millennium Dome:

My father, had he lived to see it, would have viewed it as the final triumph of capitalist consumerism. He believed that cities are built, and civilizations sustained, from the human need for permanence. The postmodernist project is an attempt to deny that need... (275).

A year later, in 1980, Scruton completed his first book on political philosophy, The Meaning of Conservatism. It was written as part of a series on various political positions for Penguin Books by Ted Honderich. Because of this book, Scruton’s fellow lecturer Jerry (G. A.) Cohen, an avowed Marxist, refused to teach a seminar alongside him—though they later made up, bonding over a shared love of architecture and hunting.

In 1982, Scruton founded the Salisbury Review to be the home of conservative intellectuals (and intellectual conservatives) in Britain. It caused a lot of backlash, especially after the publication of a piece by Ray Honeyford, a school principal who argued that multicultural teaching practices were undermining the integration of students with foreign backgrounds into Britain.

Scruton also created a stir with his book Thinkers of the New Left. It was an excoriating takedown of the intellectual godfathers of both the ‘68 Paris protest and his Marxist peers at Birkbeck. All of this, coming during the height of Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror, made Scruton a lightning rod for criticism. Reception to his work was extremely hostile. The negative attention effectively ended his academic career in Britain, and left him feeling suicidal.

But his most important work was taking place elsewhere in Europe. During the 1980s, Scruton became involved with several underground academic networks on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He helped set up the Jan Hus Educational Foundation and the Jaigellonian Trust, helping to smuggle, copy, and distribute samzidat (contraband writings) throughout Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, as well as to deliver education, lectures, and exams to dissidents.

An atmosphere of suspense and paranoia gripped these places. “In the streets the people seemed to notice nothing to smile at no one.” (GR 162). Strangers would hurry away from each other, lest they be caught up in something that might get them in trouble with the regime: “people turned towards you faces of a kind you never see in your life here: faces full of suffering, longing to trust but never sure that they can.” (CWRS 71). While walking alone at night, Scruton would occasionally hear another pair of footsteps out of time with his own—those of a spook following him at a distance.

In a crowded backroom of Prague, Scruton gave a lecture on Wittgenstein’s private-language argument to the battered remnants of Prague’s unlikely intelligentsia. They were old professors, long-haired poets, priests, and dissident students, now forced to work as boiler-stokers under the communist regime. “One thought dominated all others: here, for the first time, I was lecturing to a working-class audience, an audience of workers united by their chains.” (GR 168).

Roger also fell in love with a Polish dissident called Lenka. They discussed marrying. But Lenka was persuaded otherwise by a fellow dissident, who advised her that marrying Roger and fleeing to the West would be tantamount to abandoning her country. “That was the kind of consideration that weighed with Lenka, for whom public spirit and civil obligation have been the most important motives in her life, motives that can even be weighed against love. And of course, the person who gave her this advice married her.” (CWRS 79).

Finally, Scruton was arrested for his activities and forced to leave Czechoslovakia. He was with Jiří Müller, a dissident in the Czech Underground, who later became the first head of the Moravian Secret Police after the collapse of Communism. Müller convinced the police to let Scruton pick up his things before leaving. They followed the pair to Müller’s house and surrounded it while Scruton got his stuff. Inside, Müller went into the windowless bathroom and started swallowing all the messages and other incriminating slips of paper!

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Scruton spent the next few years in Central Europe with his charity groups, before teaching at Boston University for three years. His interests at this time gravitated towards music. He taught a graduate course and wrote a book on the aesthetics of music. He also wrote an opera, The Minister, about a politician who sacrifices love for career. While it was basically ignored in England, it got an enthusiastic reception in Czechoslovakia, where the Ministry of Culture paid for several runs of it.

Upon his return from the United States, Scruton wanted to escape the academic world, focus on his writing, and try to help preserve the rural England that he felt was disappearing. He purchased a farm near Malmesbury in Wiltshire and got involved in the local economy through farming, and animal husbandry. He met his second wife Sophie while out on a hunt. Scruton’s works from this time are often about the natural world or have environmental themes, such as On Hunting and Green Philosophy.

Because the emergence of agriculture led to an irreversible shift in the relationship between man and his environment, it required a new ideal of stewardship:

The hunter-gatherer is supported by the environment; the farmer supports it. We have re-made the relation between man and nature as one of mutual dependence. So if farming is to be done properly, it must also be a nurturing and a tending of the land, a kind of stewardship. (CWRS 130)

This desire to steward and nurture the land grows out of the love of home—oikophilia, as Scruton calls it. It is the starting point of his green philosophy, which maintains that a personal link with the environment is essential to aligning our interests with the preservation and renewal of the natural world around us.

Scruton appeared to be finding peace at last. He had a tranquil farm, a place to call home, and, finally, a child of his own: Sam. Childbirth not only brought Scruton the joys of fatherhood, but gave him a sense of psychological closure that he had denied himself his entire life:

[Stanley Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting book from Roger Scruton. Interesting he was a conservative philosopher, that I had the misfortune not to know even existed until his passing in January of this year. I have read several of his articles, along with watching several of his recorded interviews and lectures. With his loss, the world has lost an intellectual giant, that it was my misfortune not to find until after his death. This work is a work a articles on various subjects, many involving his youth and life. I really enjoyed chapter on Sam. Highly recommended...SLT

[Jeremy]

Scruton died in 2020. Dreher recommends this book as place to start with Scruton's work.

[Ian Clary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully reflective book that I enjoyed reading very much. The late Sir Roger Scruton is one of my intellectual heroes, not merely because he had such a powerful mind that he applied to a range of subjects; from analytic philosophy to aesthetics, from conservatism to the environment, from opera to religion. More than this, Sir Roger seemed to understand both the beauties and the sorrows of life in a way that was not merely intellectual, but was felt by his very soul. He could see, in the talismans of this world, into a world beyond, hence why his views of architecture, music, and the fine arts all resonate within my own soul. This is all the more affirmed for me in his "Gentle Regrets," a moving memoir that contemplates those aspects of life that have shaped him the most.
I feel a deep resonance with his life story. In fact, I've often wondered if we're related somewhere in the not-too-distant past: when I look at his picture, I can't help but see my gran's face and, as they were both in some way connected to Manchester, think that he and I share a relative somewhere in our family tree. I also understand aspects of his own past as I too have a strained relationship with my father, and as a result, struggle with my own duties as a father. Like Sir Roger, the sufferings of this life are brutally felt, and yet they somehow point to a way forward (as he rightly notes, in a way opposed to the transcendence of suffering-as-desire in Buddhism) wherein we find God.
When Sir Roger passed away a year and a half ago, I couldn't allow myself to really confront what his loss meant for me personally. As I've now finished this memoir, I think that I now have some understanding that I've lost a fellow traveler who, in the midst of his own discoveries of meaning in this world, has also helped interpret them for me. What Ruskin and Eliot was to him, Sir Roger was to me. I'm very glad, therefore, to have his body of writing at my finger tips that I can return to for insight and consolation.
Requiescat in pace, Sir Roger.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a lot from this book. I especially liked the chapter on why Roger Scruton became a conservative, and also the chapter about music. We're talking about "serious" music here - you know, actual music (I add that I also like the chapter on music in The Closing Of The American Mind by Allan Bloom, which says something about my musical tastes--but nothing, note, about Roger Scruton's). In the chapter on music, RS makes the observation that there is a current school amongst opera directors to do things like set The Magic Flute in a modern brothel (He may not have used this exact example, but you get the picture). This is because, he says, (and I agree with him), we are uncomfortable with the idea of the sacred in this post-modern world in which all that is holy is profaned. This deep point is enlarged upon without bitterness. A glowing description of Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande inspired me to do more "hard core listening" to operas, which, if I am honest, do generally make me feel rather uncomfortable.
The idea of the sacred, and human attitudes towards the sacred, are amongst the main themes of the book. "Stealing from churches" was a new and fecund idea for me.
The chapter about his trip to Finland was very interesting--there is a certain "Scrutonian Finnishness" about New Zealand, I think.

[Ciprian Pintilei · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quintessentially British autobiography, steeped in a kind of melancholy that seems (to me) the mark of an English gentleman. Scruton was a giant.

[Bill Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://beingbeliefbehavior.blogspot....

[Jazeps · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked all of the book except the parts on poetry and opera which I simply don’t understand for lack of training, but I particularly enjoyed the great summary of Burke’s thoughts and the hillarious Finland notes. The last chapter on religion is the best description of religion for a non-believer I have ever read.

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sheer beauty that pervades through the reflections in the first half of this book is almost entirely lost when one passes the half-way mark and finds oneself scanning through the rambling descriptions of characters and conference rooms in central Europe during the Soviet era, and page after polemic page dedicated to the assertion of a conservative view on music and architecture, which serves to heavy the eyelids more than anything else, despite this reader's strong sympathies towards these principles.
Nevertheless, a worthwhile read if only for the deep insight into a life lived offered in the first half, and the occasional gem of wisdom one encounters in the dust of the second half of this book.

[NDH · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the possible exception of Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”—in which Montaigne promised to present himself ‘tout nu’ to his readers—I don’t trust the autobiographical genre, mostly because the writer only tells us what he wants us to think of and about himself, ‘managing the narrative’ so to speak. Roger Scruton’s “Gentle Regrets” is no exception, although it’s certainly arguable that it isn’t really an autobiography. It proclaims to be an attempt to answer the question, ‘How did you come to be what you are?’. RS even refers to, “These autobiographical excursions…in this book” which he then qualifies as “an attempt to explain a particular conservative outlook.” Whatever the case, it isn’t much of an autobiography; some reminisces of his father, stories of the three Sam’s—dog, horse, and son, the last named, presumably, after the other two—, a bit of sadness about a failed first marriage and hints of regret about fouling the nests of more than a few young girls over the ensuing decades, and at least one unrequited love. It’s all pretty standard self-indulgence presented in a tone that reminds me of Paul Simon’s…”it’s a still-life watercolor, of a now-late afternoon, as the sun shines through the curtain-lace, and shadows wash the room.” Quite nice, actually. But it’s not quite an autobiography, it’s certainly not complete, it feels rather cobbled-together from disparate writings that RS sent to the publisher in some desperation searching for content, and it doesn’t really answer his own question about the genesis of his beliefs. The chapter on Finland is the most egregiously out-of-place, and I can’t help but wonder if the Fins ever asked him back. I doubt it, after that chapter, if any of them read it. I certainly wouldn’t. Likewise, the chapter “Impressions d’Afrique” not only explains nothing, I am utterly baffled by the several pages of RS’s “poetry” on Miss Hap. What could possibly have led RS to imagine that such would hold any interest for anyone under any conditions? Was his Editor on vacation the week that was submitted?
To be fair, the chapter on architecture was pretty good. I’m glad to see that RS and the then Prince of Wales were in agreement about carbuncles on the face of an old friend—although the fire station in Poundbury seems to have won the ‘Carbuncle Award’—and I’m also happy to learn that RS and his father enjoyed some sort of reconciliation. And his work in Eastern Europe strikes me as wholly admirable, about which I’d like to know more. I’m sure he accomplished more good in Prague and thereabouts than the soixante-huitardataires ever did anywhere. As for fox hunting, I find it quite remarkable the extent to which RS “made it” into the upper echelons of English society—philosophy , high culture, hunting with hounds—despite his proletarian background—sometimes the apple falls very far from the tree!—but I don’t “get” hunting. My son’s father-in-law has a basement full of gazelle heads and other stuffed trophies mostly from Africa, and I can’t think of any reason they all had to die at his hands.
Be that as it may, in the end, RS could not restrain himself from ruining the book (for me at least) by including his final chapter, Regaining my Religion, which was really little more than an overlong sermon composed by a drunken clergyman. He really should have gone back and re-read what he’d written and asked himself, “Is that really what I want to say?” It comes across as the ranting of a cranky, angry old man who’d hoped to be fondly remembered as merely curmudgeonly.
I’m sorry. I actually like Roger Scruton’s thinking about architecture, conservatism, anti-communism, the little platoons and such. I’m even willing to accept his opinions on opera and art—high culture, as he might say—although spouting “gobbledegook” does not seem to be a fault exclusive to modernists, and RS’s dread of “kitsch” (or cliché)seems a little extreme, a form of obsessive-compulsive intellectual hand-washing. (It’s kind of hard to enjoy anything if one is always worried that actually it might be kitsch…)And, final observation…anyone who, after 9-11, quotes, approvingly, anything from the Koran, hasn’t been paying attention.
So, an autobiography this is not, and it doesn’t really explain so much as it distracts.
Still, I’ve got 2-3 more books by Roger in the pipeline. His voice is soothing without being soporific.
“Yes we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said.
Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is (opera) really dead?”

[John]

Finished probably 70% of this, and not going to rate it because it was an emotionally difficult, complex experience to read. It's hard to rate a memoir. Reading it brought an intimate meeting with someone whose sensibilities overlap with mine in certain respects and violently clash in others; with whom I have so much sympathy as a fellow, suffering human being in a difficult world, who expresses his own feelings and memories at times with such poignancy and vulnerability, at other times with a self-serving quality and an exaggerated, rigidly judgmental persona that is hard to bear. I'd need more than my middling level of interest in Scruton and his thought to bear the remainder of the book, but have valued this experience of his voice, with all the discomfort that involved.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to write a review of a book with so many seemingly disconnected facets. The parts of his biography were amazing, and provided great insight into the man he became and his intellectual development. It would be a very difficult task, but I would like to see someone write a thorough biography of his life and his thought.

The best parts of the book by far were the first 3-4 chapters and the last two chapters, because those were where he revealed his humanity the most.

The book took me longer to read than most books because I had to adjust to his vocabulary, syntax, phrasing and sentence construction. I wouldn't recommend it to most people.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes
19... How I discovered culture .... grew to immaturity in the 60s, when discorder was the order of the day
21... It was important to misbehave in an interesting way.
86... Sam the dog ... 99, Sam the horse, a wondrous docility which has always earned forgiveness.
110... what I had reproached in my mother as timidity I remembered now as gentleness.
111... neoteny humans born helpless
133... Aunt Betty was a simple soul, an instinctive musician

[Linda Mock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scruton tells the story of his childhood, which was obviously painful to him, without bitterness or blame. At times, the beauty and pathos his writing invokes, can make one almost forget the personal strain he felt as a young boy and man. It's a lovely story of a man's intellect coming into its own and his heart finding a home.

[Diana Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

a gift to enhance your life

An amazing book that is full of thoughtful, intriguing and insightful ideas. A very personally revealing and good humoured account of his life that illuminates your own. I highly recommend this wonderful book.

[Devin]

He wrote in Gentle Regrets (2005): "Friends come and go, hobbies and holidays dapple the soulscape like fleeting sunlight in a summer wind, and the hunger for affection is cut off at every point by the fear of judgement.”

[Graham Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult at times, but easier than some of his oeuvre and a good introduction to the author's background and thinking.

[Gilson Landry S. Brasil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it.

[Joseph D. Walch · Rating 4 out of 5]

The life and development of a great conservative religious, philosophical thinker.

[Reading List · Rating 1 out of 5]

Man loves horses

[Gabriel García Jolly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esto es todo lo que un libro de filosofía tiene que ser hoy (y siempre): erudito y riguroso, audaz y vivaz, con entraña y sentido común, personal y esperanzado.

[Bernardo Trindade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very humane. These are the thoughts about and of the life of a very sensitive and knowledgeble philosopher, for whom life has a deep meaning. I learned a lot about how to think about my own life, about where I stand, about my childhood, music, architecture, community life, and about my lost religion. It also made me more aware and honest about the reality of the human fundamental condition and of the importance of the transcendental.

[Jeff Wills · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a first class memoir by a first class philosophical mind. Very good read.

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminating. Consoling.

[Jeff Wills · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good memoir of an English conservative philosopher.