Margins
A Land Held Hostage book cover
A Land Held Hostage
1987
First Published
4.33
Average Rating
100
Number of Pages
In this book, published in 1987 during the course of Lebanon s civil wars, Roger Scruton explains and defends the old settlement of Lebanon, and the emergence in modern times of the only Arab country in which politicians gained and relinquished office without the aid of bullets. This remarkable country, in which Muslim and Christian, Shi a and Sunni, Maronite and Druze lived under a single jurisdiction and an elected Parliament, was destroyed. Why, and how? Those are the questions that Roger Scruton tries to answer in this succinct and vivid book, whose relevance to events now unfolding in the Middle East is greater than ever.
Avg Rating
4.33
Number of Ratings
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Author

Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
Author · 52 books

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C. In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband. In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).

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