Sir Roger Scruton, 1944-2020

January 12, 2020 – 1:50 pm

It was with terrible sadness that I learned today that Sir Roger Scruton has fallen from the ramparts at age 75. He was a man of incomparable culture, erudition, discrimination, and integrity. Not only has Western civilization lost one of its greatest defenders; it is also as if a magnificent library has just been burnt to the ground.

Posted by Malcolm on at 1:50 pm, filed under General. RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

4 Comments

  1. Francis Berger says

    Typo. 2020

    Posted January 12, 2020 at 2:50 pm | Permalink
  2. Malcolm says

    Fixed, thanks.

    Posted January 12, 2020 at 3:09 pm | Permalink
  3. Joseph A. says

    Sad, indeed — especially for us as we continue to lose the last scholarly gentlemen — vestiges of a society that is slipping into (deliberately forgotten) history.

    He was about three weeks younger than my father, it seems. Memory eternal!

    Posted January 12, 2020 at 4:03 pm | Permalink
  4. Whitewall says

    On Instapundit now:
    ROD DREHER: Sir Roger Scruton Is Dead. Dreher quotes this passage from Scruton:

    The witch-hunting hysteria has returned with a vengeance, not in Eastern Europe but here, where open enquiry and the presumption of innocence have been, until this moment, the foundation of moral order and the guarantee of civil peace.

    Even the Divinity School at Cambridge, which once bravely helped us in offering degrees to our students, has joined in the witch-hunt, revoking a fellowship offered to the conservative thinker Jordan Peterson in response to a petition littered with the signatures of ignorant snowflakes.

    And when, just a few months ago, I was summarily removed as the (unpaid) head of a Government quango – Building Better, Building Beautiful – for things I had neither thought nor said, my Czech colleagues said: ‘Yes, it is starting again.’ And by ‘it’ they really did mean It.

    Now in Britain, as then in Czechoslovakia, the true intellectual is a dissident, and if our national memory is to survive, it will be because we have succeeded in building here, as once we built there, an underground university devoted to knowledge.

    Posted January 12, 2020 at 4:59 pm | Permalink

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