I can see that Roger Scruton is going to cause almost as much controversy in his death as he did in his lifetime: the question being whether or not it is possible to lament the death of someone independently of his (or her) views. But it’s surely legitimate, indeed desirable, to respect someone of such wide-ranging, if wilfully adversarial views: a philosopher, who trained as a barrister and was turned down as a Tory candidate for being too intellectual; a writer on aesthetics, a sufficiently rare phenomenon; a musician and a novelist. I didn’t know him, but I can still admire the work he did in Czechoslovakia and believe that independent thinking is desirable on the right as on the left.