I’m drinking my morning coffee at home from a paper cup I swiped from Scruton, the Budapest coffeeshop dedicated to the memory of Sir Roger. Scruton is a great space, and I can hardly wait for it to open up fully (for now, you can only get take-out coffee from there, because of Covid). Wouldn’t it be great if American university towns had a Scruton, as a hangout for conservatives, and a place to debate and discuss? Read the full article HERE.

The secret university. Roger Scruton’s work with dissident intellectuals in the Eastern Bloc was risky but crucial. The full feature by Jessica Douglas-Home is taken from May 2021 issue of The Critic, it is available to read here.

Read all the latest from Scrutopia HERE.

Music was an essential part of Roger Scruton’s life. He learned the piano as a boy, and as an adult acquired the profound technical knowledge that enabled him to write The Aesthetics of Music, widely recognized as the most important book in its field. He also wrote two books of essays on music, and three magisterial books on Wagner – Death Devoted Heart (on Tristan und Isolde), The Ring of Truth, and his final book, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption. He taught himself to compose (with a little help from me) and wrote two operas, The Minister (1998) and Violet (2005), both of which were staged and which, as I experienced myself, are musically and dramatically effective. Composing for him was a sideline, although if he had not decided to pursue just about everything else, Roger might have become an important contributor to the music of our time

Read the full article HERE on the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation website. 

Read all the latest news from Scrutopia HERE.

Local communities will be at the heart of plans to make sure that new developments in their area are beautiful and well-designed, under proposals outlined by Housing Secretary Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP today (30 January 2021) You can listen to the announcement here.

We are pleased to read that Building Better Building Beautiful Commission recommendations have been taken up by the government in its formal response which can be found here. 

Read all the lastest news from Scrutopia HERE.

Perhaps one of the finest obituaries to have been written which has appeared in the Jesus College Cambridge Annual Review, 2020 by Stephen Heath, whom we didn’t know, but who clearly followed Roger’s work closely. Thanks to Professor Heath’s article, Roger has been made to feel at home in Cambridge. You can read the obituary here.

It is easy enough to point out the incoherence of the radicals: the layers of reflexive ideology, senseless iconoclasm, ignorance, and inherently unfulfillable demands. And point them out we should. 

But then what? 

No merely critical standpoint can build, let alone ‘conserve’ anything. One can lament the fire ravaging Notre Dame, but a dislike of fire confers exactly none of the knowledge required to build—or indeed, rebuild—that magnificent monument of Western culture. For that, you need architectural-mathematical understanding, aesthetic vision, as well as stone-carvers, carpenters, vitrailleurs, and so forth. Lamenting the Cathedral’s destruction is one thing; rebuilding it is another.

Sir Roger understood that. You can’t counter nihilism, you can’t defeat the iconoclasts, by critique alone. Indeed, even to focus primarily on critique is already to concede that the game is one of tearing-down, one of destruction.  

Read the full article HERE on the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation website.