Scruton’s Modern Culture (1998) includes this book in his bibliography, labelling it “neo-Marxist debunking of the aesthetic — the last gasp of the Sixties”. Scruton’s incisive survey of “strata in the modern consciousness”, which concludes that we are in a “spiritual limbo” where public life is “moronised”, also calls urgently for a new departure, and (almost in desperation) commends the secular-minded Confucius to us. Writing Beauty though (2009), he finds a new direction — declaring that “God is beautiful”, he claims that “as Plato and Kant both saw, the feeling for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of mind, arising from a humble sense of living with imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest unity with the transcendental”. This profound and delightfully idiosyncratic little book is one of his responses to Eagleton’s Ideology, and if one were to search all Eagleton’s writing looking for evidence of an equal love of artistic beauty, one would probably search in vain.

In 2011, as if to hammer home the fact that he is no mere aesthete, Eagleton published Why Marx Was Right, a refreshingly brisk treatise which declares that, amongst other virtues, Marx was “even more hostile to the state than right-wing conservatives”, that “his model of the good life was based on the idea of artistic self-expression”, he “lavished praise on the middle class”, and that “there has been no more staunch champion of women’s emancipation and world peace”. He is determined to distance Marx from the Soviet nightmare. The reader, wondering if this splendidly enlightened figure was merely naive, might well feel prompted to go and read some of the mighty prophet for himself.

In 2012, the debating forum Intelligence Squared arranged for the two to discuss their favourite topic. They agreed, in impeccably civilised tones, on some important things — that culture has become regrettably commodified; that universities succumbed to the market in setting up too many courses in business studies, etc; that high culture was not necessarily elitist; and that such things as the literary canon were not fixed entities. Eagleton did not respond to Scruton’s point that Marxists should grasp basic truths of human nature; but then Scruton was disingenuous when, asked if there could be a conservative ideology of culture, he said that it would not involve any Marx-like analysis of economic power — which left his opponent the easy retort that while conservatives certainly have an ideology, they often preferred not to articulate it. Overall, a draw in terms of performance, though Scruton was the wittier.

Now, each produces a book a year, trying as honestly and searchingly as they can to get to the bottom, or the edge, of things.  Each has a publisher in the United States — Princeton for Scruton, Yale for Eagleton. And their relationship has become more complex: both have changed without being false to their past; and for both this has meant a turn towards religious thought. In 2009, Eagleton (who describes his Irish Catholic education amusingly in The Gatekeeper), produced Reason, Faith and Revolution — Reflections on the God Debate, in which he attacked the hard atheism personified in “Ditchkens” (Dawkins and Hitchens), and was hailed by James Wood as “its most vigorous critic”. Though “God does not ‘exist’ as an entity in the world”, he said, there is a less definite kind of faith which is “not primarily a belief that someone or something exists, but a commitment and allegiance — faith in something”.