An Inward Turn

Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, by Roger Scruton (Continuum, 256 pp., $28.95)

MOST readers of NATIONAL REVIEW know of Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, opera composer, rider to hounds, anti-Communist agitator, polemicist, and author of a long shelf of books. But I would wager that few readers are acquainted with the creature who emerges from Gentle Regrets, Scruton’s wistful, magnanimous, and ineluctably intelligent memoir. For while there are a few grains of philosophy in this book, something about music and opera, a chapter about horses and hunting, and a handful of intellectual and political battles recalled, Roger Scruton the public personage is only intermittently on view. Instead we are introduced to a shy, even timid, boy. He has red hair-horrors! His father, a bitter, lower-middle-class socialist, resents Roger’s existence almost as much as he resents his own. His mother, in a desperate bid for refinement, calls him “Vernon” (his middle name, but how could fate be so cruel?).

About the Author

Roger Kimball

Mr. Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books, and co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.

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Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, by Roger Scruton (Continuum, 256 pp., $28.95)

MOST readers of NATIONAL REVIEW know of Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, opera composer, rider to hounds, anti-Communist agitator, polemicist, and author of a long shelf of books. But I would wager that few readers are acquainted with the creature who emerges from Gentle Regrets, Scruton’s wistful, magnanimous, and ineluctably intelligent memoir. For while there are a few grains of philosophy in this book, something about music and opera, a chapter about horses and hunting, and a handful of intellectual and political battles recalled, Roger Scruton the public personage is only intermittently on view. Instead we are introduced to a shy, even timid, boy. He has red hair-horrors! His father, a bitter, lower-middle-class socialist, resents Roger’s existence almost as much as he resents his own. His mother, in a desperate bid for refinement, calls him “Vernon” (his middle name, but how could fate be so cruel?).