England

England: An Elegy by Roger Scruton, 247 pages

England: An Elegy is philosopher Roger Scruton's paean to an England that disappeared in his lifetime.  During the decades following the Second World War, a culture that relied on enchantment was subjected to a rude disenchantment by "seditious bigots" enflamed by a prejudice against history and tradition - but placing blame is not the purpose of Scruton's work.  He writes to praise what was lost, not to blame her murderers.

Central to Scruton's celebration of the England that was - not the "Merrie England" of legend but England as it lived and grew down through the centuries - is his awareness of her as primarily a work of moral imagination, endowed with her own personality through the contributions of her members and the landscape from which she was born.  The key to that personality is found in the quality of reserve, a skeptical distance conducive to honesty and its daughter virtue, humility.  This emotional distance makes possible a gentle neighborliness quite different from the impassioned involvement which so easily turns into meddling.  Scruton admits that the old England was not perfect - nothing merely human is - but at least it was something, and, for his part, he sides with "somewhere against nowhere".