What makes Roger Scruton so distinctive a figure on the British intellectual landscape is the extraordinary range of his interests and sympathies – aesthetics, architecture, farming, hunting, literature, music, philosophy and, above all, religion. They are mediated through a sensibility that combines erudition, moral seriousness, and what seems very like wisdom. Inevitably those virtues have ensured Scruton’s malicious exclusion from British academia, although one wonders whether he would be content in that small world of envious drones and ‘wacky women’, and of thought reduced to outcomes, outputs and league tables.

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