A Dove Descending
Sinclair-Stevenson (1991)
From Cyprus to the Hebrides, from London to Prague-Roger Scruton's stories cover a wide geographical area and yet a wider psychological terrain. Often experimental, but always controlled, the writing propels each story irresistiblly towards its climax, creating unforgettable characters and the atmospheric situations in which their destinies are revealed.
A Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the West
Claridge Press 1987
In this book, published in 1987 during the course of Lebanon's civil wars, Roger Scruton explains and defends the old settlement of Lebanon, and the emergence in modern times of the only Arab country in which politicians gained and relinquished office without the aid of bullets.
A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism
Bloomsbury 2006
What principles should govern our relations to the nation-state, to the environment, to other species, to other cultures and toother ways of life? How should we approach marriage, religion, evil and mortality?
Against the Tide
Bloomsbury (2022)
The best of Roger Scruton's columns, commentaries and criticism. The definitive edition of the late Sir Roger Scruton's philosophical and political essays and reviews, now collected in one volume.
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy
Penguin 1996
"Philosophy's the 'love of wisdom', can be approached in two ways: by doing it, or by studying how it has been done," so writes the eminent philosopher Roger Scruton. In this user-friendly book, he chooses to introduce philosophy by doing it.
Animal Rights and Wrongs
Bloomsbury 1996
A revised and improved edition of a book in continuing demand. Do animals have rights? If not, do we have duties towards them?
Be Attitudes
Sundey Hill Press (1997)
Many have been influenced by Sir Roger's ideas and thoughts, but perhaps did not know his range of interests included writing poetry.
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Oxford University Press 2010
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling.
Confessions of a Heretic
Notting Hill Editions 2016
Twelve hard-hitting essays arising from a decade of engagement with the public culture of Britain and America that touch on matters of concern to all intelligent people, in the volatile times in which we live.
Confessions of a Heretic Revised Edition
Notting Hill Editions 2021
Introduced by Douglas Murray
A collection of twelve provocative essays by the philosopher and political thinker Roger Scruton. Each ‘confession’ reveals an aspect of the author’s thinking that his critics would probably have advised him to keep to himself.
Conservatism: Ideas in Profile
Profile Books 2017
Roger Scruton looks at the central ideas of conservatism over the centuries. He examines conservative thinking on civil society, the rule of law and the role of the state on the one hand; and freedom (including freedom of expression and association), morality, equality, property and rights on the other.
Conversations with Roger Scruton
Bloomsbury (2016)
This book reveals what life was like for Roger Scruton growing up in High Wycombe, how he survived Cambridge and how he came to hold his conservative outlook.
Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
Oxford University Press 2004
A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms.
England: An Elegy
Bloomsbury (2001)
In this poignant and personal tribute Roger Scruton gives an account of England which is both an illuminating analysis of its institutions and culture, and a celebration of its virtues.
Fools Frauds & Firebrands
Bloomsbury (2015)
The thinkers who have been most influential on the attitudes of the New Left are examined in this study by one of the leading critics of leftist orientations in modern Western civilization.
Gentle Regrets
Bloomsbury (2005)
Roger Scruton is Britain's best known intellectual dissident, who has defended English traditions and English identity against an official culture of denigration.
Green Philosophy
Atlantic Books (2012)
The environment has long been the undisputed territory of the political Left, which has seen the principal threats to the earth as issuing from international capitalism, consumerism and the over-exploitation of natural resources.
How to be a Conservative
Bloomsbury (2014)
What does it mean to be a conservative in an age so sceptical of conservatism? How can we live in the presence of our 'canonized forefathers' at a time when their cultural, religious and political bequest is so routinely rejected?
I Drink Therefore I am
Bloomsbury (2009)
The ancients had a solution to the alcohol problem, which was to wrap the drink in religious rituals, to treat it as the incarnation of a god, and to marginalize disruptive behaviour as the god's doing, not the worshipper's.
Kant: A Very Short Introduction
Oxford University Press (2001)
Kant is arguably the most influential modern philosopher, but also one of the most difficult.
Modern Culture
Bloomsbury (2000)
Received by the British press with equal acclaim and indignation, this book sets out to define and defend high culture against the world of pop, corn, and popcorn.
Modern Philosophy: An introduction and survey
Penguin Books, (1994)
Philosopher Roger Scruton offers a wide-ranging perspective on philosophy, from logic to aesthetics, written in a lively and engaging way that is sure to stimulate debate.
Music as an Art
Bloomsbury 2018
Music as an Art begins by examining music through a philosophical lens, engaging in discussions about tonality, music and the moral life, music and cognitive science and German idealism, as well as recalling the author's struggle to encourage his students to distinguish the qualities of good music.
News from Somewhere: On Settling
Bloomsbury (2004)
For a number of years Roger Scruton has contributed a weekly article to the Financial Times on country matters.
Notes from Underground
Beaufort Books (2014)
Set in the twilight years of the Czechoslovak communist regime, this novel describes a doomed love affair between two young people trapped by the system. Roger Scruton evokes a world in which every word and gesture bears a double meaning, as people seek to find truth amid the lies and love in the midst of betrayal.
On Human Nature
Princeton University Press (2017)
In this short book, acclaimed writer and philosopher Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects.
On Hunting
Yellow Jersey Press (1998)
Modern people are as given to loving, fearing, fleeing, and pursuing other species as were their hunter-gatherer forebears.
Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England
Atlantic Books (2012)
For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian.
Philosophy: Principles and Problems
Bloomsbury (2005)
Roger Scruton shares the ideas and arguments which initially attracted him to the subject and those which have engaged his attention throughout his career.
Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach
Bloomsbury (2009)
Roger Scruton is one of the outstanding British philosophers of the post-war years. Why then is he at best ignored and at worst reviled? Part of the reason is that he is an unapologetic conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke.
Soul of the World
Princeton University Press (2014)
The Soul of the World is a defence of the sacred against today's fashionable forms of atheism. Our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone.
Souls in the Twilight
Beaufort Books (2018)
As the lights that have guided us go out, people begin to wander in the twilight, seeking their place of belonging. In these stories, set in recent times, but before the blinding glare of social media, Roger Scruton describes the remembered landscapes of people who are not where they belong, and not quite where they wished to be.
Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction
Oxford University press (2002)
Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) was at once the father of the Enlightenment and the last sad guardian of the medieval world.
The Aesthetics of Architecture
Princeton University Press (1979)
Scruton takes his readers on a journey through aesthetic theory and tries in every sense to apply them directly to architecture. By using theories from Kant, Marx, Freud, Hume, Alberti, Ruskin and many others on topics such as constructivism, and literary theory, Scruton tries to find the essence of architecture. Has architecture an essence?
The Aesthetics of Music
Oxford University Press (1997)
What is music, what is its value, and what does it mean? In this stimulating volume, Roger Scruton offers a comprehensive account of the nature and significance of music from the perspective of modern philosophy.
The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism
Carcanet (1995)
Roger Scruton is never less than forthright, and in his lucid and challenging essays on architecture he anatomises the spatial imagination of the age by analysis and comparison.
The Disappeared
Bloomsbury (2015)
It is a story of our times, of kidnap and rescue, of abuse and healing. The first magazine review by Julie Bindel is published in Standpoint.
The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
Bloomsbury (2012)
Roger Scruton explores the place of God in a disenchanted world. His argument is a response to the atheist culture that is now growing around us, and also a defence of human uniqueness.
The Ring of Truth
Penguin (2016)
Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung is one of the greatest works of art created in modern times, and has fascinated both critics and devotees for over a century and a half. No recent study has examined the meaning of Wagner's masterpiece with the attention to detail and intellectual power that Roger Scruton brings to it in this inspiring account.
The Roger Scruton Reader
Bloomsbury (2009)
The Roger Scruton Reader is the first comprehensive collection of Scruton's writings, spanning a period of thirty years.
The Uses of Pessimism
Atlantic Books (2010)
The argument of this book proposes that the tragedies and disasters of the history of the European continent have been the consequences of a false optimism and the fallacies that derive from it.
The West and the Rest
Bloomsbury (2002)
In this astonishing new book, Roger Scruton argues that to understand adequately the roots of Islamic terrorism, one must understand both the unique historical evolution of the state and the dynamic of globalization.
Understanding Music - Philosophy and Interpretation
Bloomsbury (2009)
Roger Scruton first addressed this topic in his celebrated book The Aesthetics of Music (OUP) and in this new book he applies the theory to the practice and examines a number of composers and musical forms.
Wagner's Parsifal: The Music of Redemption
Penguin (2020)
There are few writers who can so enhance our understanding of one of the greatest works in western music.
Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
Bloomsbury (2017)
Addressing one of the most politically turbulent periods in modern British history, philosopher Roger Scruton asks how, in these circumstances, we can come to define our identity, and what in the coming years will hold us together.