Oakeshott's Retirement in Dorset
Oakeshott in his retirement,
courtesy Kenneth Minogue
By Acton standards the Oakeshott cottage was ample, formed of both halves of what had been a two-family house. A small kitchen, dining room and upstairs guest bedroom and bath occupied what had been one dwelling; a living room, study and upstairs bedroom the other. What might have been a second upstairs room had been pulled out to give the living room a two storey skylit space over the fireplace. The wall space that was not covered with book shelves displayed Christel Oakeshott's abstract paintings.
The furnishings of the cottage were not so much rude as miscellaneous. The kitchen had two small refrigerators, an old stove, a toaster oven, a space heater and mismatched cabinets. A single piece of carpet, bought at a church rummage sale, covered the floor. Oakeshott had charted the irregular pattern of the appliances and cabinets on the back of the carpet, laid it out in the garden and cut it exactly to fit...
But the main furnishings of the cottage were Oakeshott's books. He had disposed of most of those he considered merely informative and retained a consummately civilised library. In his later years he took to giving away some of his more cherished volumes, but still there remained shelves upon shelves testifying to years of enjoyment of history and fiction, philosophy and poetry, memoirs and essays, and pleasant hours of browsing in second-hand bookshops.
– Josiah Lee Auspitz,Michael Joseph Oakeshott (1901-1990), American Scholar, 1991 (Full article available in Acrobat format)