In what, though, when the Marxist vision is weakening? On Evil (2010) strikes a paradoxical balance between Marxism and Christianity; Culture and the Death of God (2015) argues that religion has left a gaping hole in our culture that neither politics, culture nor sport can fill, but (in the last paragraphs) suggests that Christianity might play its part — for it offers “not supernatural support” but the “inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution . . . the sign of [which] is solidarity with the poor and powerless”. Hope without Optimism (2015) doesn’t build on this, nor does it place much hope in radicalism — indeed Eagleton criticises the Marxist Ernst Bloch for being “hospitable to the whole wealth of human culture — but only . . . in order to appropriate it”, something of which he has perhaps been guilty himself. He then analyses how King Lear and Mann’s Doctor Faustus deal with tragic despair, finding that both bleak masterpieces offer a thread of hope which seems connected to neither God nor Marx. Eagleton remains a lapsed Catholic who won’t let go.

Because of their reciprocity, Scrugletopia is a kind of dialectic, which has been good for Eagleton’s approach and style. He has not in the end sunk into Gallic pretentiousness or German exhaustiveness. Thus in Culture (2016), he takes us on a lucid tour of the Kulturkritiker just as Scruton had done, referring to many of the same writers from Kant through Arnold to Eliot; he doesn’t mention Derrida or Foucault once, but instead devotes pages to the eccentric socialist credo of Oscar Wilde.

Scruton’s religious commitment is deeper: he seems to be an Anglican Deist — a faithful churchgoer who rejects the Resurrection and afterlife. In The Soul of the World he advocates “cognitive dualism”, a willingness to understand what things mean, at the same time as scientifically exploring what they are made of. This approach aims “not, as Kant argued, to destroy the claims of reason in order to make room for those of faith, but rather to create the space at the edge of reason where faith can take root and grow".

Taking this further in On Human Nature (see Adam Zeman in Standpoint, March), Scruton rejects consequentialist and contractarian justifications for morality; he doesn’t defend theism as such, but says that our sense of the power of relationships, of the moral and social structures that arise from them, is not captured by the “moral arithmetic” of Parfit and Singer, and argues “that we can only do justice to some of our moral emotions by invoking a concept of the sacred”.