The Inklings and Friends
Oxford, C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien and Friends
Owen Barfield’s Participation
Owen Barfield was sometimes called “the silent Inkling”. C.S.Lewis called him “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.” Both having survived the Great War, Barfield and Lewis became friends at Oxford, and their [...]
What Lucy Saw
In Prince Caspian Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy are drawn from a country railway station in England, to a Narnia that is thousands of years older than when they were there last. (Narnian time, they [...]
Pitiful Caliban and Gollum
Here is one of the essays from my book Reluctant Allies: Essays on Eliot and the Inklings. J.R.R.Tolkien was famously antipathetic towards Shakespeare, and there is no suggestion that the beastly Caliban inspired Middle Earth’s [...]
Confessions of an Anglophile
I became infected with this most deadly disease when I was ten years old. The 1966 World Book Encyclopedia Yearbook arrived, and working my way through it I came across the obituary of T.S.Eliot. [...]
Lockdown T.S.Eliot Book Club – 5
By now I hope you have learned a bit more about T.S.Eliot and his poetry. I'm afraid the response to the T.S.Eliot Book Club has not been as enthusiastic as I would have liked. [...]
Eliot’s Daring Surrender
Welcome to the fourth installment of our Lockdown T.S.Eliot Book Club. In the last installment I tried to explain how to understand Eliot's work. It is as if you are given a puzzle to [...]