Editor from to of The Salisbury Review , a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over 50 books on philosophy, art, music, politics, literature, culture, sexuality, and religion; he also wrote novels and two operas. Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing the May student protests in France.
Jack's father's birth certificate showed him as Matthew Lowe, after Matthew's mother, Margaret Lowe Scruton's great-grandmother ; the document made no mention of a father. However, Margaret Lowe had decided, for reasons unknown, to raise her son as Matthew Scruton instead. Scruton wondered whether she had been employed at the former Scruton Hall in Scruton , Yorkshire, and whether that was where her child had been conceived.
Jack was raised in a back-to-back on Upper Cyrus Street, Ancoats , an inner-city area of Manchester, and won a scholarship to Manchester High School, a grammar school. He wrote in Gentle Regrets : "Friends come and go, hobbies and holidays dapple the soulscape like fleeting sunlight in a summer wind, and the hunger for affection is cut off at every point by the fear of judgement. After passing his plus , he attended the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe from to , [ 21 ] [ 22 ] leaving with three A-levels , in pure and applied Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, which he passed with distinction.
The results won him an open scholarship in Natural Sciences to Jesus College, Cambridge , as well as a state scholarship. Having intended to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge , where he felt "although socially estranged like virtually every grammar-school boy , spiritually at home", [ 25 ] Scruton switched on the first day to Moral Sciences Philosophy ; [ 14 ] his supervisor was A.
In , he began studying for his doctorate at Jesus College and then became a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge — , where he lived with Laffitte when she was not in France. He was in the Latin Quarter in Paris , watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones, and for the first time in his life "felt a surge of political anger": [ 31 ].
