News from Somewhere: On Settling

Description

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.

Sir Roger Scruton is widely seen as one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a polymath who wrote a wide array of fiction, non-fiction and reviews. He was the author of over fifty books. A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, Scruton was Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London; University Professor at Boston University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He was one of the founders of the Salisbury Review, contributed regularly to The Spectator, The Times and the Daily Telegraph and was for many years wine critic for the New Statesman. Sir Roger Scruton died in January 2020.

"Written in an avuncular, mellifluous style, given to great detail about the workings of country folk, the intricacies of the land, the plethora of wild and domesticated critters, his memoir conflates, in story, history, philosophy, and theology, the depth and meaning of community and place.... The reader will find Scruton's memoir both charming and interesting. It is a layered and nuanced apologetic, brilliantly rendered, for a class of people who hover on the verge of extinction. And, while he writes of the intimate relationship among the farmer, his land, and stock his theme concerns the philosophical question of how we should live."- Robert C. Cheeks, The University Bookman, Volume 44 Number 4 ' he exudes . . . a longing for belonging, a love of ponds more than rivers, a belief that the diminished colours in the winter landscape are what bind us to it . . . ' * Independent, The *