Roger Scruton’s funeral takes place in London today, and he’ll be in the thoughts and prayers of his admirers worldwide – many of them in Poland. We Poles owe him an unusual debt, one he mentioned in his Spectator diary last month when he wrote about his journey to Warsaw. Andrzej Duda, the Polish president, presented him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit in recognition of his ‘extraordinary efforts in supporting the democratic transformation in Poland and for developing Polish-British academic and scientific exchange’. In his Spectator diary, he wrote about how he also met men that day who had been imprisoned for 20 and 30 years under communism. Their testimonies left him “in a shocked and sober frame of mind,” he wrote, “knowing how little all of this means to young British people today, as the knowledge of the history and culture of Europe slips from their grasp.