This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to Life and Arts with Dominic Green for Spectator USA.

Hello, I'm Dominic Green. I'm Life and Arts Editor of Spectator USA.

And welcome to our weekly Life and Arts podcast.

This week I'm casting the pod with Sir Roger Scruton, the Knight of the Living Philosophers.

But he's not just a philosopher, he also writes widely and well on subjects ranging from wine to Wagner

and fox hunting to fiction. And this week I've travelled to Scrutopia, his farm in Brinkworth, Wiltshire.

Scruton now has not one, not two, but three books coming out. The philosopher

has conservatism, an invitation to the great tradition. The music critic has a collection,

music as an art, and the fiction writer has Souls in the Twilight, a collection of short stories.

Roger Scruton, welcome to Spectator USA.

Thank you for inviting me.

The most extraordinary thing to be addressing Spectator USA.

I don't know what they'll make of you, but there you are.

You're a prolific writer.

You have several books on the blocks at the moment.

Is that necessity or compulsion? Well, I don't think of myself as prolific as all that.

Some books I write by necessity, the little book on conservatism, which has just come out in America,

I wrote by necessity because the publisher offered me an advance for it. And that was, once you've

taken the advance, there is then the obligation to fulfill your part of the deal. So I did that,

and I enjoyed that. But the other books,

in particular the book of stories, those are stories I've been working on over the last 10 or 15 years,

just every now and then returning to them, just five stories which contain my observations of the world in which we are,

...