Nostalgia, however, is the mother of loyalty. - Noel Annan, Baron Annan

The profound emotional impact of the horror and slaughter convinced many that the values which had held good before the war must now, by definition, be wrong—if indeed they were not responsible for causing the war. A society which permitted such a catastrophe to occur must be destroyed, because the pre-suppositions of that comfortable pre-war England were manifestly false. Searching for a new way in which to regard conduct, the ’twenties came to see it through the eyes either of Mrs. Webb or of Mrs. Woolf.

It is true that in the most hallowed and ancient of our institutions of higher education, still whispering the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, it can be asserted that the best that has been thought and said must inevitably and inescapably be handcuffed to the study of the Anglo-Saxon. Still there has been a change.

Professor Scruton should — from time to time — try to take the advice Keats gave to his brother. "The only way of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party."