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“... just – through inattention, or distracted by TV – missed the parental announcement. In my own case, there was no possible confusion, but then I was twice Watkins’s age, and my father put me through an elaborate maastricht of public information and consultation, describing Winchester to me. When he had finished, I said, ‘It sounds just like ...”

“... then admirable precedents are not wanting. Conceits can be combined with stories at acceptable cost to the stories. A narrative line can be more or less sustained through complex verse-forms and under repeated pressure from centrifugal interests. Think of The Faerie Queene, with its awkward nine-line stanza and its heavy concluding alexandrine: in this ...”

“... He was not the sort of person who succeeded in turning his life into a work of art. When C.S. Lewis wrote of ‘a hideous moral spoonerism: Giant the Jack-Killer’, he was passing judgment on Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, rather than commenting on the despot’s actual career. But there is something depressing about that, too. His armies are always ...”

“... also raises a question about Cooper’s overall insistence that (contrary to the belief of C.S. Lewis) romance heroines – and heroes too, for that matter – are chaste, their desires immovably fixed on the person they love. Within marriage, accusations of a woman’s adultery, Cooper insists, are almost invariably false, at least in the English ...”

“... more, 15th-century Chaucerians came perilously close to killing it. Their efforts recall what C.S. Lewis (writing in Latin) once accused Renaissance humanists of doing: destroying Latin as a living language by smothering it in classical affectations, even as they boasted of its revival.Mourning, in Freud’s formulation, becomes melancholia when its ...”

“... tricks of voice and tone to worry about replicating the bullying quality he identifies in C.S. Lewis’s writing, and after illustrating an argument he’ll step back to concede that a particularly seductive passage might add up to little more than ‘a special effect in prose, controlled by me’. When he expounds his subjects’ thinking from the ...”

“... some theologians in the Fifties to works such as The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature: C.S. Lewis, for example, condemned ‘merely aesthetic’ interpretation of the Bible as a way of dodging its religious claims. But Lewis was not a Biblical scholar, and it would be hard to find a single example of anyone engaged in ...”

“... to the argument. In the end it does all hang together homologously. Nuttall singles out C.S. Lewis as a typical opponent. Lewis was certain that in Elizabethan and early Stuart England some thoughts that later became possible were still unthinkable, and should therefore be ruled out of consideration. Paradise ...”

“... prejudice apparent as late as Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, but Oxfordians like C.S. Lewis assailed modernism from a conservative standpoint and Carey does it from a populist one. Modernism was by far the most significant movement of the period with which the book deals: it changed the face of literary culture and shook art to its ...”

“... books, though, just read themselves – E. Nesbit with her wit and hidden political mischief, C.S. Lewis when his eye was on the story. And then there was Philip Pullman – whom I met first in his delightful retelling of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp (1993), and then in the cosmically ambitious His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000). I am no doubt unusually ...”

“... taken very seriously, the significant subject duly chosen, and fleshed out. The result, in his own case, could become a dull though brilliantly intelligent novel like The Princess Casamassima. All the right materials are there, and the treatment exquisite and exemplary, but the result is lifeless. The careful look at a social situation has notably failed to ...”

“... reviews; he thinks, perhaps wrongly, that it was possible to do so as recently as 1969, but in any case it is true that fees have gone down in real terms and ‘it’s hard to corrupt anyone now on £70.’ Indeed the risk for young writers is that they may love the job too much. ‘Waking to the flop of the jiffybag on the mat, he knows it as the sound of the ...”

“... at least as well documented, still before him. Long biographies are in fashion, and the serious case for this one must be that Betjeman’s influence on insular taste really has been quite profound. He persuaded the nation that some things were interesting, or even frightfully interesting, which the constraints of fashion, and a general readiness to be ...”

“... scholarship: but it is remarkably like Biographia Literaria – of which I once heard C.S. Lewis remark: ‘Clearly a work of genius, but you couldn’t possibly give it a PhD.’ Empson’s critical writing is like a conversation among people who know each other very well, have all read the same books and are prepared to take a great deal for ...”

“... suggested nonetheless that the process had gone too far, and that even giants like Empson and C.S. Lewis could be guilty in this way of serious distortions of a text: he instanced a bravura passage in The Allegory of Love on Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’, in which Lewis, with his characteristic puritanical ...”