24 Facts About Roger Scruton

1. Roger Scruton singled out Peter Singer, a prominent Australian philosopher and animal-rights activist, for criticism.

2. Roger Scruton told The Guardian in 2010 that he would no longer defend the view that revulsion against homosexuality can be justified.

3. Roger Scruton considers that religion plays a basic function in "endarkening" human minds.

4. Roger Scruton agrees with Alain Besancon that the totalitarian society envisaged by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four can be only understood in theological terms, as a society founded on a transcendental negation.

5. Roger Scruton is best known for his writing in support of conservatism.

6. Roger Scruton sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and on the board of visitors of Ralston College, and is as well a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

7. Roger Scruton is a senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.

8. Roger Scruton took an unpaid research professorship at Buckingham University, and in 2010 was awarded an unpaid visiting professorship at the University of Oxford to teach graduate classes on aesthetics.

9. From 2001 to 2009 Roger Scruton wrote a wine column for the New Statesman, and made contributions to The World of Fine Wine and Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, with his essay "The Philosophy of Wine".

10. Roger Scruton set up a company, Montpelier Strategy LLC, to promote the house as a venue for weddings and similar.

11. Roger Scruton took a year's sabbatical from Birkbeck in 1990 and spent it working in Brno in the Czech Republic.

12. Roger Scruton wrote that editing The Salisbury Review effectively ended his academic career in the United Kingdom.

13. In 1982 Roger Scruton became founding editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal championing traditional conservatism in opposition to Thatcherism, which he edited until 2001.

14. Roger Scruton continued teaching at Birkbeck until 1992, first as a lecturer, by 1980 as reader, and then as professor of aesthetics.

15. Roger Scruton told The Guardian that his colleagues at Birkbeck vilified him over the book.

16. Roger Scruton was awarded his PhD in January 1973 for a thesis entitled "Art and imagination, a study in the philosophy of mind", supervised by Michael Tanner and Elizabeth Anscombe.

17. Roger Scruton graduated in 1965, then spent time overseas, some of it teaching at the University of Pau and Pays de l'Adour in Pau, France, where he met his first wife, Danielle Laffitte.

18. Roger Scruton left school with three A-levels, in pure and applied mathematics, physics and chemistry, which he passed with distinction.

19. Roger Scruton wrote in Gentle Regrets: "Friends come and go, hobbies and holidays dabble the soulscape like fleeting sunlight in a summer wind, and the hunger for affection is cut off at every point by the fear of judgement.

20. Roger Scruton lived with his parents, two sisters, and Sam the dog, in a pebbledashed semi-detached house in Hammersley Lane, High Wycombe.

21. Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire to John "Jack" Scruton, a teacher from Manchester, and his wife, Beryl Claris Scruton, and was raised with his two sisters in Marlow and High Wycombe.

22. Roger Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".

23. Roger Scruton became known in the 1980s for helping to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit by President Vaclav Havel in 1998.

24. Roger Scruton embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France.