He was the most prolific British philosopher of his generation and the most consistently out of step. He read Spinoza at Cambridge, took the Paris philosophy agrégé in 1968 with riots in the street outside the lecture hall, found himself temperamentally on the wrong side of every fashion he encountered, and went home to write. Fifty books over the next fifty years, on aesthetics and architecture, on Wagner and Janáček, on conservatism and the nation, on hunting and wine, on God and the body and the face and the voice and the holy. He farmed in Wiltshire; he played the organ in a country church; he kept hounds. He was knighted in 2016, denounced in 2019 in a misquoted New Statesman interview, exonerated three months later, and died of cancer in January 2020.

What follows is a working anthology. Fifty-two quotations drawn from the English Wikiquote — books, interviews, magazine pieces — and three small vignettes drawn from the passages that have stayed longest with people who read him properly.

I. On Beauty

His most-read book. Oxford University Press commissioned a Very Short Introduction on beauty in 2009; he answered with the most lucid account of the subject in modern English. The thesis is in the opening pages, set out here as Scruton himself set it out: beauty is a real feature of the world, not a private indulgence — and its loss, when it happens, is something we feel as a loss.

II. Oikophilia

From the Greek — oikos, the household; philia, the love that binds. He proposed the word in Green Philosophy (2012) for the motive that lies beneath conservation, conservatism properly understood, and the small daily loyalties beneath the loud abstractions of the political life. The exercise below is the literal version: each day, name your place; name the small thing you loved about it today. Over the year, the log becomes the case.

III. I Drink Therefore I Am

His charming, brief volume on the philosophy of wine, published 2009. Scruton was no oenophile in the trade sense; he liked claret because it was claret, and Pol Roger because it had been served at his wedding. The book’s thesis is that wine’s point is not the wine: it is the company, the unhurried hour, the conversation that becomes possible when both parties have a glass to look at and not to attend to. Log not the wine alone but the company.

On reading him

The starting point is Beauty (2009) — lucid, short, the most accessible of his books. Then either How to Be a Conservative (2014) for the political thread, or On Human Nature (2017) for the philosophical thread — both run from the same Spinozistic root. The Soul of the World (2014) is the late thesis on the sacred; England: An Elegy (2000) is the personal one. The wine book and the hunting book (On Hunting, 1998) are the human Scruton, the country gentleman; they are also where the prose is loosest and best. Avoid the journalism collections at first — the books are stronger.

The biographical work to read is Gentle Regrets (2005), his own memoir, especially the chapter on his Anglican childhood and the long late chapter on dissident Czechoslovakia, where he ran the underground philosophy seminars that earned him the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit in 1998 and made certain English critics call him “a Cold Warrior” ever after.