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News from Somewhere: On Settling
For a number of years Roger Scruton has contributed a weekly article to the Financial Times on country matters. Always beautifully written, one of these pieces (Vegetables) won the 2002 prize from The Queen's English Society for the best piece of prose writing of the year. These are not sentimental bucolic rambles. Scruton's prose is devoid of sentimentality and soggy nostalgia. Whatever he writes about, he always writes with serious purpose. He speaks up for the country dweller who sees his or her world eroded by the wishy-washy liberal commands of Blairite do-gooders who sit on their backsides in North West London pontificating about the needs of country people. Nature being red in tooth and claw is something that these people only know about from sitting in a classroom. Farming issues are equally important in this book. The devastations of the foot and mouth crisis showed graphically how great is the divide between town and country dwellers. And when the fate of people in the countryside is decided by bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg, their feeling of alienation is even greater. These are the causes that Professor Scruton espouses and he has become their most intelligent, articulate and clear-thinking advocate.
192 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2004
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About the author
Roger Scruton
140 books1,353 followersSir 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).
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).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 4, 2025
Although the writing was very pretty, this book and its thesis felt inaccessible and unattainable. It just felt like a pompous, crotchety, (albeit very smart,) old man was telling me why my generation and my lifestyle are awful without giving any realistic or attainable thoughts on how to achieve the bliss he has. The more I got to know Scruton throughout his writing the less I liked him and the less I even wanted to try and hear what he was saying. As idyllic as a farm in the Cotswolds sounds, I think I’ll stick with my life of McDonald’s and pasteurized milk.
February 28, 2017
A mix of autobiography and elegy.
August 12, 2018
Six chapters of prose poetry. Perhaps my favourite Scruton book of the year, so far.
August 16, 2025
If you end up asking yourself what the point is of this book, you have in fact missed the point. This is a wonderful book, but it's not an argument, not advice, and not a memoir. It's an experience, whereby Scruton plucks you up and drops you into a world most people are very unfamiliar with.
I admit this is not the kind of book I would normally pick up, but there's something completely magical about it. Scruton's prose is wonderful--I am not joking when I say I would keep this book just to study his descriptions so as to improve my own writing. The book is structured as a series of six essays--soil, people, animals, home, place and future, whereby Scruton takes you on a tour through the different aspects of his life loosely connected with each of these topics.
The most personal chapter is "Home," where he speaks of his immediate family the most. Scruton married and had children late in life (his fifties I think) and he wrote this book when his children were still toddlers so this chapter as the funniest, as it mixes his inherent [good-humored, self-deprecating] curmudgeonliness with the experience of parenting a toddler in the modern world. Some portions of this chapter were so hilarious that when I read them, I ran back inside to my family to read the sections out loud to them.
Scruton's sense of humor is peppered throughout the book, but half of what really makes the experience of reading the book so enjoyable is Scruton's thoughts, insights and commentary that permeate every page. In that sense, there is a seventh subject you learn about in this book, and that subject is Scruton himself. You can tell immediately that Scruton is a philosopher by the philosophical and analytical nature of his commentary and observations about everything from ponds to hedgerows to hunting to hats to soil to...well, everything. The whole book is suffused with it. More than that, you can tell from the book that Scruton loves his home and his neighborhood, that he is good-humored, and despite his sometimes sharp (and funny) judgments, that he is actually quite humble--a trait not all philosophers share. More even that, in reading this book, you will finally be able to understand why this stuffy-old philosopher from England is so strangely popular in some quarters--it's not because of his political commentary [I know very few people who know of him for that reason], it's not because he held some prestigious post at Oxford or Cambridge, and it's not because he lived a faultless life, for he did not--but because he had some glimmer of wisdom. You can see it in his descriptions and observations of the world, and you cannot help but think, as you read him, that he has gotten some shadow of a glimpse of what CS Lewis might have called something like, "the truer and better world, the actual real world", and has walked away changed and wiser because of it. In reading this book, you cannot help but think he would have been an excellent person from whom to seek advice.
None of this is to idolize Scruton. He was not perfect. Nor is it to suggest that I agree with him on everything. I do not, and in some parts of the book I think he gets a little carried away with his interpretation of things. These little nits though do not take away from the overall power of the book or my general impression that Scruton was wise. It's inspired me enough that I will certainly read so more of Scruton in the coming weeks - maybe something in aesthetics or his books on architecture or sexual desire, both of which I have and have tried to read before but never made it through, though they are well-regarded. We will see. But this book is definitely worth reading if you have the patience for the type of book it is. It's completely lovely.
I admit this is not the kind of book I would normally pick up, but there's something completely magical about it. Scruton's prose is wonderful--I am not joking when I say I would keep this book just to study his descriptions so as to improve my own writing. The book is structured as a series of six essays--soil, people, animals, home, place and future, whereby Scruton takes you on a tour through the different aspects of his life loosely connected with each of these topics.
The most personal chapter is "Home," where he speaks of his immediate family the most. Scruton married and had children late in life (his fifties I think) and he wrote this book when his children were still toddlers so this chapter as the funniest, as it mixes his inherent [good-humored, self-deprecating] curmudgeonliness with the experience of parenting a toddler in the modern world. Some portions of this chapter were so hilarious that when I read them, I ran back inside to my family to read the sections out loud to them.
Scruton's sense of humor is peppered throughout the book, but half of what really makes the experience of reading the book so enjoyable is Scruton's thoughts, insights and commentary that permeate every page. In that sense, there is a seventh subject you learn about in this book, and that subject is Scruton himself. You can tell immediately that Scruton is a philosopher by the philosophical and analytical nature of his commentary and observations about everything from ponds to hedgerows to hunting to hats to soil to...well, everything. The whole book is suffused with it. More than that, you can tell from the book that Scruton loves his home and his neighborhood, that he is good-humored, and despite his sometimes sharp (and funny) judgments, that he is actually quite humble--a trait not all philosophers share. More even that, in reading this book, you will finally be able to understand why this stuffy-old philosopher from England is so strangely popular in some quarters--it's not because of his political commentary [I know very few people who know of him for that reason], it's not because he held some prestigious post at Oxford or Cambridge, and it's not because he lived a faultless life, for he did not--but because he had some glimmer of wisdom. You can see it in his descriptions and observations of the world, and you cannot help but think, as you read him, that he has gotten some shadow of a glimpse of what CS Lewis might have called something like, "the truer and better world, the actual real world", and has walked away changed and wiser because of it. In reading this book, you cannot help but think he would have been an excellent person from whom to seek advice.
None of this is to idolize Scruton. He was not perfect. Nor is it to suggest that I agree with him on everything. I do not, and in some parts of the book I think he gets a little carried away with his interpretation of things. These little nits though do not take away from the overall power of the book or my general impression that Scruton was wise. It's inspired me enough that I will certainly read so more of Scruton in the coming weeks - maybe something in aesthetics or his books on architecture or sexual desire, both of which I have and have tried to read before but never made it through, though they are well-regarded. We will see. But this book is definitely worth reading if you have the patience for the type of book it is. It's completely lovely.
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February 25, 2010None
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews