News From Somewhere: On Settling [Hardcover]

Roger Scruton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826469302 | ISBN-13: 978-0826469304 | Publication Date: June 30, 2004

For a number of years Roger Scruton has contributed a weekly article to the Financial Times on country matters. Always beautifully written, one of these pieces (Vegetables) won the 2002 prize from The Queen's English Society for the best piece of prose writing of the year. These are not sentimental bucolic rambles. Scruton's prose is devoid of sentimentality and soggy nostalgia. Whatever he writes about, he always writes with serious purpose. He speaks up for the country dweller who sees his or her world eroded by the wishy-washy liberal commands of Blairite dogooders who sit on their backsides in North West London pontificating about the needs of country people. Nature being red in tooth and claw is something that these people only know about from sitting in a classroom. Farming issues are equally important in this book. The devastations of the foot and mouth crisis showed graphically how great is the divide between town and country dwellers. And when the fate of people in the countryside is decided by bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg, their feeling of alienation is even greater. These are the causes that Professor Scruton espouses and he has become their most intelligent, articulate and clear-thinking advocate.

Editorial Reviews

Review

' he exudes . . . a longing for belonging, a love of ponds more than rivers, a belief that the diminished colours in the winter landscape are what bind us to it . . . '

(Independent, The )

"Written in an avuncular, mellifluous style, given to great detail about the workings of country folk, the intricacies of the land, the plethora of wild and domesticated critters, his memoir conflates, in story, history, philosophy, and theology, the depth and meaning of community and place.... The reader will find Scruton's memoir both charming and interesting. It is a layered and nuanced apologetic, brilliantly rendered, for a class of people who hover on the verge of extinction. And, while he writes of the intimate relationship among the farmer, his land, and stock his theme concerns the philosophical question of how we should live."- Robert C. Cheeks, The University Bookman, Volume 44 Number 4

“Written in an avuncular, mellifluous style, given to great detail about the workings of country folk, the intricacies of the land, the plethora of wild and domesticated critters, his memoir conflates, in story, history, philosophy, and theology, the depth and meaning of community and place…. The reader will find Scruton’s memoir both charming and interesting. It is a layered and nuanced apologetic, brilliantly rendered, for a class of people who hover on the verge of extinction. And, while he writes of the intimate relationship among the farmer, his land, and stock his theme concerns the philosophical question of how we should live.”- Robert C. Cheeks, The University Bookman, Volume 44 Number 4

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Professor Roger Scruton was formerly Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London and now works full time as an author and journalist. He is the author of many outstanding books including The West and the Rest, Elegy for England and On Hunting.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 177 pages
• Publisher: Continuum Intl Pub Group (June 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826469302
• ISBN-13: 978-0826469304
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,621,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Non-naive love for British rural heritage, March 23, 2005

By 

Extollager (Mayville, ND United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: News From Somewhere: On Settling (Hardcover)

News from Somewhere is about a personal and communal relation to a place. The relations are not only economic but historical and of the soul. Hedges, foxes, cows, cats and herons are some of the animals in the place (rural Wiltshire) of which the author writes; also discussed are children, circus players, and the District Nurse. One doesn't often come across a book exuding so much probing intelligence and affection. The intelligence probes realities of rural life, including unappealing ones relating to agribusiness, plastic, cars, signs, sheds, as well as the more appealing ones that draw ever more "incomers." The affection is centered not on abstractions but on specific people, places and things, including the night sky as known from one place on the earth's surface. The sensibility thus evident is an attractive one.

Some of the book's most interesting passages, for this reader, concerned the rearing of children. Scruton doesn't seem to have heard of homeschooling, as it has come to be called in the United States; but, if citizens can do this legally in Britain, that seems to be where Scruton's convictions will lead him. Indeed, he and his wife are obviously already teaching their children, but apparently as a supplement to the pedagogy of a government school or private school. The next step is recognition that mass education, with honorable exceptions, inculcates dispositions of the heart that are unwholesome, and manifestly fails to discipline and nurture the mind as it should. If you seek the monument of modern education, look about you. That's why hundreds of thousands of Americans have undertaken the exodus from the schools; may this freedom spread.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The predicament for the meta-farmer, January 30, 2009

By 

Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: News from Somewhere: On Settling (Paperback)

Roger Scruton is stereotyped in the British media as a curmudgeonly old reactionary. A sort of thinking man's Richard Littlejohn. But this portrayal scarcely does justice to the range and depth of his philosophical mind.

In 'News from Somewhere' Scruton turns his wealth of aesthetic and intellectual learning to the predicament of the rural community of Wiltshire - the ocunty in which he settled in mid-life with his young wife Sophie.

Each page teems with one of Scruton's elegant and thoughtful insights into a whole range of country issues: from the way in which rural ways of life are undermined by government edicts, to the aesthetics of petrol station canopies, to the best way in which to cook a squirrel.

Scruton's gratitude for the way in which the rural community has allowed him to settle, late in life, with a young family is manifest. His brief reflections on the urban London phase of his life suggest that he was a rather lonely, unrooted individual.

But now that he has settled he faces another predicament, which accounts for the agitated tone of much of this book. Scruton comes from the urban university world of culture, argument, verbal pyrotechnics and learning. The farmers come from a very different community. Scruton eulogises the honest trades of the farming folk, contrasting their work with the consultancy based advice of the modern 'knowledge economy'. Yet Scruton cannot farm, and he earns his living exactly in this knowledge form - by critical writing about how other people live (he has even set up his own farming consultancy!). Though he describes some of his own attempts at farming, the reader is never convinced that this man, one of Britain's most learned intellectuals, is truly content with the routine, repetitive manual labour of the typical farmer.

This contrast is exemplified by the image Scruton chooses for the dust jacket (of the hardback) and explains inside: Brueghel's painting of the fall of Icarus showing the flailing legs of Icarus disappearing into the sea as the ploughman on the hill continues with his work unaware of this event.

Scruton resembles Icarus in this respect. He wants to inhabit the life of the solitary ploughman, but he cannot. His learning is far to great for that. Hence he can never properly inhabit the Arcadian Eden he lusts after. For to do that he would have to unravel his years of education. And education, as Scruton well knows, is the one thing that humans can never shed once it is acquired.