In the soft-centred mush that today passes for political discourse, Roger Scruton’s discordant voice is a joy. He challenges the assumption on which our ‘society of wimps and scroungers’ is founded: he holds that ‘human beings neither are nor ought to be equal’. For this heresy he has been subjected to the abuse of his politically correct academic colleagues. Byron-like, he has shaken off the dust of their company and taken to fox-hunting.

He is a grandee who hunts with the Beaufort and has commuted from Boston to Badminton for Saturday meets. I have remained a poor provincial, strapped for cash. Rising in the dark to muck out and saddle up, hacking five or six miles to a meet and bedding down the horses again in the dark tends to knock any mystical stuffing out of one. Hunting cannot be for me, as it has been for Scruton, a life transforming experience. It is an ingrained habit. I just enjoy it.

The core of this book is a description of the joys, the sheer excitement of fox-hunting, familiar to those who hunt but rarely conveyed with such poetic intensity. It is a masterpiece that can stand beside the best of Surtees and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man as an undisputed classic. The description of a puppy show, held in pouring rain, is a memorable set piece; that of a dinner with Enoch Powell, a comic gem. (Powell sold his foxhunting coat to his admirer, Mr Scruton; it split at the seams the first time out.)

The discovery of landscape is among the pleasures of hunting. But this discovery is, for Scruton, more than an aesthetic experience. It is a revelation:

Ancestral patterns of ownership and labour speak to us from our landscape – patterns that have been wiped away from the industrial prairies of East Anglia