When Sir Roger Scruton talked with me in 2018 about Conservatism: An Invitation to a Great Tradition, one of his more than 50 works of nonfiction, I assumed he’d felt the need to defend his strain of political thought, it being increasingly under attack. No, he said, he wrote it “because there was an opportunity to get a bit of money by way of an advance.” Disarming me further, he added, “Nor did I choose that subtitle. The publishers have you by the goolies, and they do what they want with the manuscript once they’ve got it.”

Scruton was a funny, scrupulously honest man. His unaffected modesty and light use of a colloquial but inoffensive vulgarism were typical. He could have given a stately, pompous answer of the type that in interviews commonly trip from the lips of authors, filmmakers, et cetera, but he abjured humblebragging in favor of real humility.