His death is truly a loss

I refer to the late Sir Roger Scruton whose death has just been announced.  I can't claim to be an expert on all of his writings which were prodigious but when I came across him back in the '80s when I was a subscriber to the Salisbury Review, I instantly recognised a ferocious intelligence and intellect which seemed to become keener as he grew older.  Alas, today a brilliant light has been extinguished.

Douglas Murray - who better? - has written an excellent summary of Sir Roger's life over at the Coffee House.  It is well worth a read.

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On Instapundit, an excerpt:

ROD DREHER: Sir Roger Scruton Is Dead. Dreher quotes this passage from Scruton:

The witch-hunting hysteria has returned with a vengeance, not in Eastern Europe but here, where open enquiry and the presumption of innocence have been, until this moment, the foundation of moral order and the guarantee of civil peace.

Even the Divinity School at Cambridge, which once bravely helped us in offering degrees to our students, has joined in the witch-hunt, revoking a fellowship offered to the conservative thinker Jordan Peterson in response to a petition littered with the signatures of ignorant snowflakes.

And when, just a few months ago, I was summarily removed as the (unpaid) head of a Government quango – Building Better, Building Beautiful – for things I had neither thought nor said, my Czech colleagues said: ‘Yes, it is starting again.’ And by ‘it’ they really did mean It.

Now in Britain, as then in Czechoslovakia, the true intellectual is a dissident, and if our national memory is to survive, it will be because we have succeeded in building here, as once we built there, an underground university devoted to knowledge.