Search Results

“... Subtitled ‘On Order in Architecture’, Joseph Rykwert’s exploration of the classical Orders, and their meaning for the many architects who have made use of them, has the shape, size and trimmings of a magnum opus. Footnotes and bibliography take up one third of its six hundred pages, and the text is burdened with photographs, plans and drawings illustrating each period of the classical style ...”

“... Semiotics, semiology, hermeneutics, structuralist criticism – so many labels, but how many things? If there are distinctions here, they seem to be largely hereditary. The term ‘semiotic’ comes from C.S. Peirce, ‘semiology’ from Saussure. ‘Structuralism’ has meant one thing in anthropology, another in linguistics; its application to literary theory comes partly through the work of Propp and the Russian formalists ...”

“... Like Diogenes in his tub, Roger Scruton has stripped himself of his professorship of aesthetics to rail, ungowned, against the age in which fate has deposited him. Scruton’s opposition to the times has two current manifestations: one is his lyrical advocacy of the feudal harmonies of the fox-hunt; the other is his hatred of ‘yoof’ culture ...”

“... There are many Roger Scrutons and it is not easy to reconcile them: barrister, aesthetician, champion of Senator Joseph McCarthy, teacher at Birkbeck College (an institution with a tradition of proletarian outreach), editor of the ultra-Tory Salisbury Review foxhunter. And novelist. Fortnight’s Anger (1981) was hard-going – a murky tale of adolescent sexuality full of sentences like: ‘Her hands trembled on his face and neck ...”

“... has failed to frame this subtle carnivore. Now the philosophers take the field. In Sexual Desire, Roger Scruton is bent on recapturing eros in the name of the old morality and restoring him to his proper place in the ethical zoo. No relativist he; for him the two projects described above, descriptive and prescriptive, are inseparable; correct analysis of ...”

“... remarked, reason a person out of something that they weren’t reasoned into. What Spufford and Roger Scruton want to explain – in their very different ways – is why they can’t and couldn’t be reasoned out of the Christianity that they believe in and live by. Spufford is preaching to the unconverted – though he’s more blokeishly genial than ...”

“... Female desire aims to subdue, overcome and pacify the unbridled ambition of the phallus. Roger Scruton The unbridled phallus of the philosopher Was seen last week galloping across the South Downs, Flame spurting from its flared nostril. The phallus being a horse in which Both mane and tail are bunched together at the back end, This unharnessed piece of horseflesh was of necessity unable To accompany with a display of shaken neck-hair The tossing of its head, But the tossing of its head was tremendous nevertheless, Like that of Bucephalus, the steed of Alexander ...”

“... detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to liberalism than others; some accept, other ...”

“... for less authority, less of the state, less supervision, be reconciled with the conservative idea? Roger Scruton is certain that it cannot. In his sombre, clerkly little book, he claims that freedom ‘cannot occupy a central place in conservative thinking ... for the conservative, the value of individual liberty is not absolute, but stands subject to ...”

“... it, over culture – has anything to say to us. Francis Dunlop and, one assumes, his publishers, Roger Scruton and Jessica Douglas-Home, have no doubts. Scheler, Dunlop suggests, was addressing ‘a political situation not unlike our own ... a breakdown of the old order, loss of the sense of community, triumph of material ...”

“... to play with. It so happens that the first essay in a new collection by that British conservative, Roger Scruton, is about language, and he quotes as a specimen of superior antecedent English a passage from John Evelyn. Linguistic conservatives are obviously a church, not a sect: which is to say, that they, like their Parliamentary counterparts, are at ...”

“... and to admit that arguing with (say) John Wesley, or Bertolt Brecht, or even – to be banal – Roger Scruton, would be a pretty grim business. Part of the reason for closure, or for manic pedagogy, must be political, in the widest sense of the word. Having launched a social campaign, or founded a project requiring loyalty and propaganda, it is hard to ...”

“... than those which Nicholas Ridley famously employed, but the drift is, I think, not so different. Roger Scruton writes explicitly on this theme under the title, ‘In defence of the nation’, a piece also printed as the final essay in his own more diverse collection, The Philosopher on Dover Beach. As the editor of the Salisbury Review, he has exercised ...”

“... Ivana Trump. Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the book at random only to see the name of Roger Scruton. Confused, I had another look at the cover: ‘FLIRTATION SEDUCTION BETRAYAL’. Big, strong capital letters, solid and reliable. So what was going on? There, in elegant gothic type, lay the answer: ‘The Sunday Telegraph’. Farndale works ...”

“... Bank, beginning on 23 January, under the general title Team GB?: In Search of a British Identity. Roger Scruton, whose England: An Elegy will soon be reviewed in the LRB, is giving the first lecture, and he will be followed by, among others, Robert Crawford, Meg Bateman, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Billy Bragg and Sukhdev Sandhu. You might think the editorial ...”