Conversations with Roger Scruton by Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley

by Mark Dooley

Roger Scruton is arguably the greatest living English philosopher. A prolific author of fifty books, composer of two operas, controversial columnist and academic dissident, he has stood at the heart of the intellectual life of Britain (and to some extent in the USA) for more than forty years.Mark Dooley is Scruton's intellectual biographer. In these conversations Dooley coaxes Scruton to speak candidly about those whom he has loved and loathed, about his early philosophical influences and about those who have shaped him personally and intellectually. Going deeper than any previous autobiographical statements by Scruton, this book reveals what motivated the philosopher to embrace Kant and Wagner, how he came to know and admire thinkers like Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgely, and what he said to the underground seminars in Communist Czechoslovakia and the precise circumstances surrounding his arrest and expulsion from that country.It examines what Scruton really thinks of his intellectual and political adversaries and why he believes their message remains a recipe for social collapse. He provides answers as to why he left Birkbeck University College and why he eventually abandoned academia altogether. It also includes insights into daily life on Scruton's farm, his writing routines and his astonishing capacity to produce so prodigiously. Conversations with Roger Scruton asks questions which Roger Scruton has never answered before.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Nonfiction, Politics, Cultural, Memoir, 21st Century

Hardcover

First published July 26, 2016

About the author

Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher, writer, journalist, public speaker and academic. He is also a regular radio broadcaster and guest of TV shows, and has in addition served as a speech writer. He has led a journalistic and an academic career simultaneously. He is a specialist of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion and theology. He wrote a study of Søren Kierkegaard's ethical, religious and cultural insights, and then moved on to interrogating conceptions of God and ethics, which led to the publication of two collections of essays. He then published a monograph on Roger Scruton and a collection of Scruton's texts, and was called by the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland to write about the ways forward for the Irish Catholic Church in the wake of the abuse revelations. In Moral Matters: A Philosophy of Homecoming, he develops his own philosophy and outlines his intellectual journey for the first time. Meanwhile, he is also a regular guest on the Irish radio and a columnist. [Wikipedia]

Reviews

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anybody who knows anything about Roger Scruton will find in this book a bit more. If you have read a lot because you can’t get enough, well here’s a substantial bit more. If you have read a little and are somewhat curious, here is a compendium: you’ll get something about everything he has done and quite a bit of biographical illumination. It is a book to enjoy and to think about, and that makes it one of the better books.

Biographically, it is an excellent work. An Irish admirer of Scruton interviewed him at home for three days, and then shaped those interviews into this book. I can’t imagine how anybody could do a better job of something like this than Mark Dooley has: good questions, thorough understanding, sympathy, the briefest of explanations and interjections, well-structured, completely interesting throughout because there is a clear and important focus of interest. There is a biographical feel also in that the structure is loosely chronological: we begin with Scruton’s childhood, his student years, and then work through the major changes and situations of his life, while reflecting on his books and thought. I found it illuminating in many ways, and thought-provoking. The hostility and setbacks that Scruton has faced in this world simply for pointing out bad arguments, for example, have not been inconsiderable. You gain a fuller understanding of what his work means, as a result. And that is the focus Dooley has: coming to terms with the thought of this thoughtful human being. Scruton has ranged widely, and what holds it all together is the man.

The most disappointing chapter was the one on religion. I had hoped for more. You should not think, however, that it is an uninteresting chapter. It does help you understand him and his work, and really it is foolish to expect more. Still, I had hoped for more.

The best chapter in the book is the one on living as a writer. That is principally what Scruton views as his vocation, and the book gives you a glimpse of all the elements that have gone into this. Two observations you may find alluring. “People are not interested in what you write if they do not sense the person behind it.” The oddest thing about this statement is that in its context, which I do not here provide, it is a statement of personal modesty. Whatever his faults, the humility of Roger Scruton is striking, and Dooley has figured out how to display this rare and elusive quality. “A great writer is someone . . . who can put himself completely into the mind of another person and find the language that will both express and vindicate a way of being that is not his own.”

[Ian Clary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good introduction to Scruton's life and thought, highly recommended. Gets into issues of philosophy, aesthetics, music, architecture, religion and farming. Well written and enjoyable, I read it in a few days as I couldn't put it down.

[Ronald Mackay]

Roger Scruton is a highly accomplished and seductive writer. When I read his philosophical arguments on the conservation of all the things we love and count as important in our lives (the sacred, beauty in architecture and landscape, the sense of personal responsibility, love of home, family and country) I am swept along and persuaded almost 100%. To begin to explore the tiny grains of doubt within some of his arguments and his assertions, I have neither the skill nor the language. Hence, I tend to be left with a feeling of intellectual inadequacy.

Not so with ‘Conversations with Roger Scruton’. Mark Dooley is 20 years Scruton’s junior but his peer intellectually and educationally. Both are refined men of letters. Over an intense few days, Dooley engages sympathetically with Scruton and possesses both the knowledge and the language to pose difficult questions – questions that I feel I myself should have liked to have posed had I the capability.

Dooley and Scruton’s willingness to engage as peers in this open manner brings a deeper human dimension to Roger Scruton who is rightly identified as the first author. The conversations show him to be a more rounded human being than his brilliant writing alone is capable of.
These fourteen or so conversations represent Scruton’s expansion upon his personal life, his writing and his beliefs and effectively take the reader between the lines of most of his better-known books that deal with schools of philosophy; currents of the political left and right; Central and Eastern Europe in the ’70s and the ’80s ( matter of particular interest to me having worked there extensively in the late ’60s and early ’70s); aesthetics; patriotism; sexual relations; environmental conservation; playing and listening to music; religion; university teaching; and the pleasures of wine.

Dooley asks all the right questions and insists on being answered fully. Without Dooley, many of the ideas Scruton expands upon in this book would be unavailable to us.

‘Conversations with Roger Scruton’ is a credit to both Dooley and Scruton. It is a book of huge benefit to those (like me) who warm to and would better understand Scruton but find, in his solo writings, arguments that are too succinct to be grasped with comfort.

[Harooon · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

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 cihld 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:

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hard to follow Scruton in all the exalted banter of this sort of 20th century Uriah Heep. Unpleasant brown nosing. Better read Scruton himself.

[Ana Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Em uma entrevista que se lê como uma conversa, Scruton conta sua vida e como desenvolveu sua filosofia. Apesar de ter gostado muito e de ter me surpreendido com muito do que li, achei algumas partes muito dificeis porque condensavam rapidamente pensamentos filósoficos de anos de maturidade. Se você não está familiarizado minimamente com o que Scruton desenvolve em sua obra, e não tiver uma base fundamental de filosofia, fica complicado acompanhar alguns capítulos.

[Douglas Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Dooley succeeds beautifully in making us feel that it is we (and not he) who are in conversation with philosopher Roger Scruton for three days in his little English cottage. That is, until we realize how difficult it must have been for Dooley to lead Scruton through his personal story and masterfully weave that together with subtle hints that lead Scruton to give us great insight into the development of his philosophy and his writing along the way. It is a beautiful little book, I highly recommend it.

[Rick Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Quick read, interesting to know a living Philosopher's influences. If you are following Scruton or curious to know about his influences, go for it. He's written the best introduction to Kant. I cannot believe that he read, "Critique of Pure Reason." ten times. I find that Scruton delivers his ideas with humility.

--Gottfried.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Based on interviews with the famous British philosopher and conservative Roger Scruton by Mark Dooley, an Irish lecturer in philosophy, this book provides a very readable overview of Scruton's fascinating life as well as a gentle introduction to his work and thought. Scruton ranges over many topics and he invariably has interesting, insightful things to say.

On architecture, he describes Venice as 'a lasting work of the religious imagination, a vision of eternity rising like Venus from the sea.' And says of Borromini, '[he gives] objective form to a religious experience, and building this experience not only up into the dome but down the details, so that every moulding and every shadow spoke of a world ordered towards the good. This you see especially in the church of S. Carolino at the Quattro Fontane.'

On art, he notes that 'After the reformation, the visual arts lost their iconography and painters turned to still life and to landscape painting. Dutch still life has a very Protestant feel to it, sanctifying ordinary things in their domestic uses, rather than pretending to offer glimpses of the transcendental.'

On religion, he says 'ordinary people living a religious life are, in a sense, completed in a way that they wouldn't be if they just lived according to the nihilistic worldview that our culture advocates.'

On philosophy, he discusses how, in the debate on hunting in the UK, 'deep philosophical questions were constantly being fudged or ignored for the sake of emotion', plus ça change, and notes that 'People are sentimental about animals because animals can do no wrong; but they can do no wrong because they can do no right.'

He travelled throughout his life, to Prague to join the underground fight against Communism, living twice in America and a year in France where, he says, he 'absorbed the Balzacian Catholicism of rural France...'

On his battles with the left he is as unsparing as ever and includes a brilliant take on that high priest of the far left, Ronald Dworkin, a 'kind of anti patriot, someone who looked for the objects of American loyalty in order to disparage them. He had an instinct for old-fashioned decencies, which he would hunt out in their sheltered corners and expose to ridicule.'

On sex he notes that 'it is not enough to think of our sexual relations merely in contractual terms, as though the only relevant question from the moral perspective is the question of consent.'

And, finally, saving the best for last, he ranges widely on books and writers and writing. One of his favourite books as a child was the letters of Rilke and he goes on from there to mention many books, both his own, such as Xanthippe Dialogues (which some fans described as of the funniest they have ever read) and his Introduction to Kant (considered the definitive introduction), to other writers, like Willard Quine, whose ' elegance of style was accompanied by an extreme succinctness and vividness of thought' and Monsignor Gibley's 'We Believe', 'the best statement of the ordinary doctrine of Catholicism' according to Scruton.

From his childhood with a difficult father, to the rebellious 60s, study at Cambridge, professorship in philosophy at Birkbeck, fighting communism at home in Britain and underground in Prague, his battles with the censorious left, his books, his travels and his life at closing at Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire, Scruton's life and ideas were fascinating and this book gives a very good introduction to them.

[Rashid Saif · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Scruton if you couldn't guess. What I like about him is his ability to articulate philosophically and validly what I have always believed to be the case with regards to beauty, art and the scared. This book is a sort of interview about Scruton's life, his philosophy and his music. I really enjoyed it.

Side Note:
This is the first e-book that I have read on an e-reader, I can really see myself doing this more often.

[Stanley Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Started this work and sat it aside for a week to read one of his suggested works that came available. Very good book on England’s greatest philosophers of the late 20th Century. Highly recommended...SLT

[Yog · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felt ethereal while reading this book. Beautiful prose which reaches the soul.

[Germán · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most useful book: puts Scruton's work in context, and offers good advice on what to read.