Alexander Boot

Alexander Boot (born 1948) is a Russian-born writer of books and articles, previously a university lecturer and an advertising executive. His work promotes traditionalist conservatism and European culture.

Early life Born in 1948 in Moscow, Boot grew up there in the years following the Second World War. He is of Jewish ancestry, and his father had spent much of the war as a prisoner of war of the Germans. However, Boot's father survived to bribe the doctor of the Institute of Modern Languages to gain admission for his son, who was "clever but lazy".

After graduating from the Moscow State University, Boot became a lecturer in English and American literature fleeing from the unwanted attentions of the KGB, and in 1976 his former wife also emigrated with their son, settling in California. and took to writing full-time, encouraged to write books by his friend Dr Anthony Daniels.

In 2008, Boot's essay "Political Correctness" was published in The Nation That Forgot God, a collection of essays edited by Edward Leigh, with work by Roger Scruton, Vincent Nichols, Shusha Guppy, Aidan Bellenger, and Michael Nazir-Ali. The Catholic Times noted that "The nation of the title of this book of essays is, of course, Britain. The arresting title is justified by the intellectual strength of the twelve authors." Later in 2008 Boot's "Life in Putin's Russia" was published in The Chesterton Review.

In 2009, Boot released God and Man According to Tolstoy, in which he deals with the philosophical and moral views of Leo Tolstoy, as seen in his non-fiction.

In 2011, Boot launched his own blog, alexanderboot.com.

His The Crisis Behind Our Crisis (2011) deals with the moral aspects of the Euro area crisis which followed the 2008 financial crisis and has a foreword by Theodore Dalrymple, who says in it that Boot has implacable logic and grasp of history. Reviewing the work for The American Conservative, Paul Gottfried comments that "Boot explores the metaphysical and moral origins of what are usually viewed as strictly financial questions" and notes that it is "mostly about history, philosophy, and the Christian convictions of the author."

Of How the Future Worked (2013), a memoir of Boot's years in Soviet Russia, Owen Matthews has said that the book makes sweeping generalizations and is "exuberant and chaotic, colourful, erratic… not unlike Russia itself." Identifying with traditional conservatism, he has written of Ayn Rand that she "fuses the values of cutthroat capitalism with fascist philosophy and aesthetics… Just like Marx, Rand creates an imaginary economic world that has little to do with reality."

Boot has called liberal democracy "nothing but a mendacious slogan of a virtual world", as it is "neither truly democratic nor particularly liberal", resting on the ever-growing power over people of a centralized state which has dictatorial power.

Also in 2012, Pink News called on its readers to complain about what they called a "startlingly homophobic" article by Boot in The Daily Mail.

Selected publications How the West Was Lost (I. B. Tauris, 2006, "Life in Putin's Russia" in The Chesterton Review 34 (2008), 298–305 "Political Correctness" in Michael Nazir-Ali, Edward Leigh, Roger Scruton, A Nation That Forgot God (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2008, ) God and Man According to Tolstoy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ) The Crisis Behind Our Crisis (St Matthew Publishing, 2011, ) How the Future Worked: Russia Through the Eyes of a Young Non-Person (Roper Penberthy Publishing, 2013 ) Democracy as a Neocon Trick (Roper Penberthy Publishing, 2014, )