His new book is very much aimed at the general reader. But it is also his most ambitious work in this field, as it constructs a single, large-scale theory of the nature of beauty. Paintings and poems come in for close consideration; but so, too, do landscapes and flowers, beautiful faces and bodies and what he calls the "everyday beauty" of houses, gardens and clothes. Casting his net this wide means that he has set himself a problem more difficult than the one tackled by most modern writers on aesthetics (who confine themselves to "works of art"). Yet it also helps him to formulate his solution to the problem, which is that the experience of beauty is a specifically human experience that springs from, and enhances, our general nature as rational and moral beings.

Cautiously and persuasively, he builds up his case. As he shows, beauty is not merely "in the eye of the beholder". Although a judgement of beauty is not an objective matter in the way that, say, a judgement of temperature is, it is something for which reasons can be given, and such reasons can and should have an effect on the judgements of other people. The obvious parallel case is moral judgement, where reasons matter, even if scientific demonstration is lacking.

At every step of the argument, the human dimension that gives meaning to our experience of beauty is deftly conjured up. A beautiful landscape, for example, moves us not because it is just a pleasing arrangement of shapes and colours, but because "it contains a reassurance that this world is a right and fitting place to be". Sexual beauty works on our feelings not just in the way that the smell of food works on a hungry animal; it awakens desire, of course, but it does so most fully when we desire the person whom that beautiful body embodies, and our response to it involves whole ways of feeling about him or her.

In theoretical terms, Scruton is fighting a campaign on two different fronts. On the one hand, he is against reductionists of all kinds: evolutionary biologists who reduce our experience of beauty to a by-product of mating, for example, or Marxists who regard it as false consciousness propped up by bourgeois ideology. But on the other hand he is opposed to the idealists and formalists, who think that art exists for its own sake in an ethereal realm, or claim that each work of art is a unique expression of itself and nothing else.