C. S. Lewis

RP was baptised an Anglican as a baby by parents who had trained at Church of England colleges but were not churchgoers. Brought up between her father's scepticism and her mother's eclecticism in matters...

RP became a Christian and was confirmed as an Anglican during the second world war. She wrote, There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking—well—I must find...

ZS went to Malorees Junior School and then to Hampstead Comprehensive . She was a shy, quiet girl and an overweight, anti-social adolescent, who used reading as an escape and refuge. She also loved...

Formative early reading included Richard Scarry and Kenneth Grahame 's The Wind in the Willows. Joanne Rowling did not care for Enid Blyton as a young child but acquired a taste for her later...

MB was shaped by her reading outside school. She never entered a bookshop until she was fourteen, but relied on libraries. Early favourites were C. S. Lewis 's Narnia books, Johanna Spyri 's Heidi books...

RP had a lifelong companion in Kathleen, or K, O'Hara , with whom she both worked and, from soon after the start of their business partnership, lived. It does not appear that this was an...

Despite her singularly unleisured lifestyle, RP had a remarkable talent for friendship, which extended to people with whom she might be expected to have little in common. Her friendship with Lord David Cecil brought her...

In later years, KR had a circle of friends at Cambridge which included C. S. Lewis , Edwin Muir and his wife Willa , Elizabeth Jennings , Owen Barfield , A. C. Harwood , Tom Henn

She later felt she was lucky to be a postwar student; before then, she would have been as out of place at Newnham as Amy Levy . Christianity was everywhere in the syllabus and...

Her godmother Aunt Bertha lent her the funds to attend Oxford. She was greatly influenced by the lectures of Gilbert Murray , Regius Professor of Greek, who lectured on Greek drama and had also founded...

The poem The Witch in the Wardrobe, as ENC explained to Colette Bryce , comes in part from the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis , in which a...

Here KN writes a lively style, with ingenious images and examples, paradoxes like giving a name a bad dog (by which she means taking a concept like Liberalism or Science and using it pejoratively),

E. M. Delafield writes that during the 1940s CY retained wide popularity: that the London Library 's copies of her books were often checked out by readers, and that when Delafield wrote to the Times...

This book was controversial. Philip Toynbee called it a rare example of vigorous polemic, witty, hard-hitting and deeply serious.The Times responded with a front-page article (anonymous, as all...

RP hunted out a copy of this book to present to C. S. Lewis when they first met in July 1946, writing that she thought it, though only grotesque & satirical . . . my...