Joining the army on the fall of France and being rejected for SOE because he looked too unmistakably English to be parachuted into Germany, he ended up serving in Phantom.

From a review in the July 2014 edition of The London Review, Last of the Idealists by John Gray discussing Michael Oakeshott.  

Michael Oakeshott was what in his youth would have been called a card. He was also one of the most original philosophers of his time. Throughout his long life - he died in 1990 in his ninetieth year - his tastes veered in directions not nowadays commonly associated with philosophy: he had an enduring preoccupation with religion and liked betting on horses. Unlike many academics he did not crave respectability, intellectual or otherwise; even by today's standards, his private life might be thought a bit rackety. But the life Oakeshott lived was not an unexamined one; it expressed an idea of individuality he found in the philosophers he most admired. As Luke O'Sullivan writes in his introduction to this immensely rich and superbly edited volume of the philosopher's notebooks, 'Oakeshott certainly seems to have done his best to live a life of radical moral individualism himself, though not, it must be said, without imposing considerable costs on some of those around him, particularly the women in his life.'

In one of the last of these notebooks, Oakeshott writes, 'This is a sort of Zibaldone: a written chaos.' There is something in the comparison. Giacomo Leopardi's 'hodge-podge' of personal reflections, philosophical analysis and aphoristic cultural commentary contains a powerful critique of modern life. The early-19th-century Italian poet possessed a distinctively modern mind; but he viewed the idea that modern life represented an improvement on the past with disdain. Oakeshott's attitude was not dissimilar. As O'Sullivan notes, he 'disliked more or less everything that he judged to be distinctively modern'. Yet he was a long way from sharing Leopardi's melancholy or despair. His response to the modern world was to cultivate an Epicurean gaiety and independence. (He rebuffed politely an approach by Margaret Thatcher, who had it in mind to recommend him as a Companion of Honour.) It was a style of life that combined seemingly antagonistic attitudes: a highly developed aesthetic sensitivity with a tolerance of everyday routine (he was punctilious when acting as chair of his LSE department); a capacity for intense romantic engagement with deep detachment.

Applying today's standards of correctness, many of the thoughts recorded here might be judged reactionary - which is to say they express truths that have become unfashionable. 'Perhaps the greatest principle in politics,' Oakeshott writes, 'is that people love to be frightened.' Or: 'The phenomenon of love, perhaps, more than anything else, shows the secondary place of justice and morality in human life.' Or: 'The "unbeliever" went with the "free-thinker" - that most prejudiced of beings.' There are hundreds of similarly arresting observations. A selection from forty-four notebooks composed over a period of more than sixty years, this book is a treasure-trove of thoughts, collected from a lifetime's intellectual wandering. For anyone interested in Oakeshott the man, or the development of his work, it will be invaluable.

[snip]

It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a figure like Oakeshott in academic life at the present time. For one thing, he had a wider experience of the world than most academics nowadays. Joining the army on the fall of France and being rejected for SOE because he looked too unmistakably English to be parachuted into Germany, he ended up serving in Phantom, a reconnaissance unit that, among other tasks, supplied information to the SAS. For a time his work involved using pigeons, whose behaviour he studied assiduously: when the birds were released, he once told me with a smile, many of them 'just flew off and got lost'. Finding comedy, even an element of absurdity, in the most earnest business, it was a remark characteristic of the man. He would have found the industrial-style intellectual labour that has entrenched itself in much of academic life over the past twenty-odd years impossible to take seriously. He wrote for himself and anyone else who might be interested; it is unlikely that anyone working in a university today could find the freedom or leisure that are needed to produce a volume such as this. Writing in 1967, Oakeshott laments, 'I have wasted a lot of time living.' Perhaps so, but as this absorbing selection demonstrates, he still managed to fit in a great deal of thinking.