Welcome to my website, which is a guide to my professional life as a writer and philosopher. My CV provides detailed information concerning my career.

In 2015 I published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. The Disappeared, published by Bloomsbury, has received wonderful reviews and you can read them in the reviews section. One I particularly like is from Douglas Murray at The Spectator. ‘It's a gripping, disturbing narrative dealing with abduction and abuse but also love, escape and a type of redemption’. It is about England, now.

In 2016 I 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 I published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of my philosophy. I also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).

Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering the Parisian nonsense machine – 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. All in all a shocking performance, but comparatively mildly reviewed and, by my modest standards, a bestseller. It has even been translated into French, and will be appearing in March.

Notes from Underground, my novel chosen by Ray Tallis as book of the year 2014 in the TLS, received the bronze award in the Suspense/Thriller category in the 2015 IPPY awards. It was also nominated for the IMPAC awards. It has been translated into Czech and was launched in Prague, during the Forum 2000 conference in September of 2015. A Portuguese edition is now forthcoming.

In 2018 I published a book of stories, Souls in the Twilight, issued by Beaufort Books, New York, and I am currently finishing a short study of Wagner’s Parsifal, work on which has been interrupted by my duties as Chairman of the government’s Commission on Building Better, Building Beautiful, details of which can be found here.

This summer we will be repeating our ‘Scrutopia Summer School’ through the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester Park, delivering ten days of intoxicating eccentricity in the Gloucestershire countryside. 

A special mention must go to Håkon Wium Lie for the fantastic drone footage of Sunday Hill Farm which can be seen at the top of this webpage. Pity about the collision with the helicopter full of hovering journalists. But they were all from the Guardian, so no real harm done.