"Surprised by Joy" by C S Lewis

In this autobiography, the famous Christian writer explains how his upbringing led to his beliefs. As with all his work, it is written in an amazingly simple style and is full of wonderful insights. Furthermore it is surprisingly, sometimes shockingly, honest. Although his description of his 'loss of chastity' at an early age (thirteen?) does not make it clear whether he lost his virginity in a physical sense as opposed to a spiritual one (the details are sufficiently imprecise), the descriptions of life at his public school leave little room to doubt that homosexuality was widely practised (though not, he says, by him).

What emerges is a picture of an extraordinarily clever young man who is amazingly well-read. This picture accords with those given in the biographies I have read and reviewed in this blog:
C.S.Lewis: A biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper
Jack: C.S.Lewis and his times by George Sayer

My brainy sister Jane who teaches English tells me that 'surprised by joy' is is the title of a poem by Wordsworth which deals with his guilt at feeling a moment of joy when mourning the death of his daughter. She says: "It is actually a very good sonnet, using rhythm particularly effectively."

The Joy referred to in the title of this autobiography is an experience of ecstasy or bliss, such as one might experience when walking in a beautiful landscape or hearing a beautiful piece of music or reading a beautiful poem. I have used the adjective beautiful three times; it seems to me that the Joy that Lewis describes is an essentially aesthetic experience which involves beauty. It isn't pleasure : “Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”He makes the point that it is not sexual desire or lust, that these are debasements, but it is an experience of desire. He seems to be talking about a religious, mystical experience of the transcendental. He has a moment of Joy on a walk. “It seemed to me that I have tasted heaven then. If only such a moment could return! But what I never realised was that it had returned - that the remembering of that walk was itself a new experience of just the same kind. True, it was desire, not possession. But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable. ... to have is to want and to want is to have.”

He is pretty hard on his pre-conversion self. For example, he castigates himself for snobbery including chronological snobbery: “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find out why it went out of date. Was it refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? ... One passes to the realisation that our own age is also ‘a period’, and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those wide-spread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”

He is withering about his schooling at what he calls Wyvern but is in fact Malvern College. He describes the fundamental structure with the sporting Bloods at the top and the endless jockeying for position. There was an acknowledged undercurrent of homosexuality. CSL is pretty relaxed about sex. As he says: “Cruelty is surely more evil than lust.”

• “A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors ,usually Bloods. Usually, not always. Although our oligarchy kept most of the amenities of life for themselves, they were, on this point, liberal; they did not impose chastity on the middle-class boy in addition to all his other disabilities. Pederasty among the lower classes was not ‘side’ or at least not serious side; not like putting one's hands in one's pockets or wearing one’s coat unbuttoned. The gods had a sense of proportion.”
• “The Tarts had an important function to play in making school ... a preparation for public life. They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalised.”
• “A boy goes to a Public School precisely to be made a normal, sensible boy - a good mixer - to be taken out of himself; and eccentricity is severely penalised.”
• “The whole structure of Bloodery would collapse if the Bloods played in the spirit of play, for their recreation; there must be audience and limelight.”
• “When oppression does not completely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a natural tendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt? We reimburse ourselves for cuffs and toil by a double dose of self-esteem. No one is more likely to be arrogant that a slave.”

There is humour:

• “My brother ... announced every morning with perfect truth that he had done five sums; he did not add that they were the same five every day.”
• “How a small boy who can neither flirt nor drink should be expected to enjoy prancing about on a polished floor till the small hours of the morning, is beyond my conception.”
• “It took me years to make the discovery that any real human intercourse could take place at a mixed assembly of people in their good clothes.”
• “I am one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop.”

He also makes some brilliant observations:

• "They had the talent for happiness in a high degree - went straight for it as experienced travellers go for the best seat in a train.”
• “‘The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives - they have all the works on the outside’. The works - that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism.”
• “There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not.”
• “The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead.”
• “Having once tasted life, we are subjected to the impulse of self-preservation. Life, in other words, is as habit-forming as cocaine.”
• “Those who think that if adolescents were all provided with suitable mistresses we should soon hear no more of ‘immortal longings’ are certainly wrong.”
• “The materialist’s universe had the enormous attraction that it offered you limited liabilities. No strictly infinite disaster could overtake you in it. Death ended all ... The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked exit.”
• “The sword glitters not because the swordsman sets out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly.”

There is Joy in the elegance of the writing of CSL; in the way that he can pin a feeling with a metaphor or write a description that is so exactly spot on that you can re-experience what he is describing. There is Joy in the unfussy simplicity of his writing: it is like a street of Georgian houses; it is death to the baroque and the rococo. I might not accept his theology but he makes some pretty cogent philosophical points and I am ever charmed by his style.

Other books by this remarkable and prolific writer which are reviewed in this blog:

• His science fiction trilogy
• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength
• Theology:
• The Great Divorce
• God in the Dock
• The Problem of Pain
• Reflections on the Psalms
• Literary criticism:
• The Discarded Image

Of course he wrote the Narnia children's books as well.

February 2019; 190 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Great Divorce" by C S Lewis

This is a thought-provoking book on how to be a good Christian written in a very readable and entertaining manner. It is written by the great C S Lewis who also write:

Works of Science Fiction (or as he might have called it scientifiction) which are Christian allegories:

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

The Narnia books for children (which are also Christian allegories):

• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Prince Caspian
• The Magician's Nephew
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• The Horse and His Boy
• The Silver Chair
• The Last Battle

Mediaeval literary criticism (the day job):

• The Discarded Image

CSL imagines a bus trip from the dreary and lonely town of Hell through the sky into Heaven. And he imagines all the excuses the inhabitants of Hell make either not to get on the bus in the first place or to return to Hell after their journey.

His thesis is that in order to enter and stay in Heaven you have got to relinquish your self-centredness. As he says in the Preface: “You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys”

Some people use excuses not to get on the bus:

• “A moment later two young people ... also left us arm in arm. They were both so trousered, slender, giggly and falsetto that I could be sure of the sex of neither, but it was clear that each for the moment preferred the other to the chance of a place in the bus.”
• Others don’t like the company on the bus.
• Some don’t think there will be room for them.

The newcomers in Heaven are Ghosts. They are greeted by the more substantial Angels who try to persuade them to stay. The Ghosts who can’t be persuaded include:

• Those who insist on their rights and don’t want Charity.
• Those who insist on their own opinions if they feel justified in them. 
• Those who think that their lives would be improved if the Management changed the system: “What would you say if you went to a hotel where the eggs were all bad; and when you complained to the Boss, instead of apologising and changing his dairyman, he just told you that if you tried you’d get to like the bad eggs in time?”
• Those who are too ashamed to be seen in the company of angels.
• Artists who are too in love with Art: “If you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country"
• Mothers who love too fiercely.
• Those who try to make others sorry for them and use this to manipulate others: “Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom by pity.”

The problem is that this means it is very hard to get into Heaven and CSL is worried by this: “If these Solid People were as benevolent as I had heard one of two of them claim to be, they might have done something to help the inhabitants of the Town - something more than meeting them on the plain ... How if this whole trip were allowed the Ghosts merely to mock them?” One answer offered is that “The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.” Another is that the great spirits of the blessed are just too large to squeeze into the narrow and cramped confines of Hell. I'm not sure that either truly address the question.

To enter Heaven CSL says we have to lose our self-centredness:

• “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’. ... There is always something they prefer to joy ... Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.”
• “Did ye never know a collector of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them?”
• “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” 
• “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels."
• “The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”
• “What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved.” 

Other great aphorisms include:

• “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” with the answer “If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for"
• "Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.”
• “Jesus ... was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience.”
• "Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.”

But one of the best things about a C S Lewis book are the brilliant descriptions:

• “Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering.”
• “My attention was caught by my fellow passengers ... Now that they were in the light, they were transparent ... They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air.”
• “One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless - heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man.”
• “The bus was full of light. It was cruel light. I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded. One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then - there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus - I caught sight of my own.” 
• “If a corpse already liquid with decay had arisen from the coffin, smeared its gums with lipstick, and attempted a flirtation, the result could not have been more appalling.”

Biographies about C S Lewis reviewed in this blog include:

• C S Lewis: A Biography
• Jack: C S Lewis and his times

November 2018; 118 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"That Hideous Strength" by C S Lewis

This is the third of the 'science fiction' trilogy by the author of the Narnia books). Ransom, the hero, travels to Mars in Out of the Silent Planet and to Venus in Perelandra; this book is set in a university town in the English Midlands.

In many other ways this is a very different book. Although it continues the exploration of Christian theology that is the underlying theme of the other books, rather than interplanetary excitements this book involves a struggle between the forces of good and evil involving a talking head and the discovery of Merlin, the magician from the Arthurian legends, who is not dead but sleeping underground.In many ways, therefore, this reminded me of one of the many children's books that have delivered this theme such as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner.

The plot revolves around the development of NICE, a sinister research institute that promises to revolutionise scientific research. It is, essentially, the Nazi programme and comes complete with its own police force headed by Miss Hardcastle, who goes by the whimsical but unlikely nickname of Fairy. Mark, a fellow of Bracton College, is persuaded to join NICE and part of the story follows his attempts to join the inner circle of NICE, never quite realising their true evil. The other half of the story involves his wife, Jane, whom Mark has left behind in Bracton, who has visionary dreams and joins a strange religious commune; these are the goodies who are striving to discover Merlin before NICE so they can recruit him to their side.

The main trouble with the book is that the Goodies are good and the Baddies are bad and there are no shades of grey, no characters who move from one side to the other, in fact no character development at all. Even Mark, becoming embroiled in evil, is fundamentally innocent in the sense that he is ignorant of what is really happening. And having once depicted the boundaries of Good and Evil it therefore follows that everything represented by NICE, such as relativism and scientific progress must be Bad and everything represented by the Goodies, such as growing your own vegetables and speaking Latin, is Good. There are large and tedious chunks of theology in the book but they seem to boil down to the idea that the old ways are best (one of the problems the Goodies have is that Jane is Mark's wife and a wife must obey her husband even if he has gone over to the dark side) and that good old chaps such as English dons, country parsons and honest labouring men are the distillation of virtue while people who dispute the ordained social order must be sinister (almost at the end of the book Ransom compares the Goodies (Arthur, Milton, poets) with the Baddies (Mordred, Cromwell, shopkeepers). Shopkeepers?

The other main trouble with the book is the fundamental silliness of the plot. Merlin! A (Goody) bear called Mr Bultitude! The denouement takes place at a formal dinner (after the King's health has been toasted) and is accomplished by a cheap magic trick; one wonders why the Goodies needed Merlin and one wonders how the Baddies could pose such a threat if they could be vanquished so easily.

Nevertheless, there are some moments of magic:

There are some lovely descriptions:

• “He drove slowly - almost sauntering on wheels.” (p 306)
• "There were the placid faces of elderly bons viveurs whom food and wine had placed in a contentment which no amount of speeches could violate.” (p 476)

There are philosophical insights:

• "There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one." (p 87)
• “Does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?” (p 241)

There are comments on life, in particular the relationship between men and women. Lewis has rather old-fashioned views:

• “Husbands were made to be talked to. it helps them to concentrate their minds on what they're reading - like the sound of a weir.” (p 93)
• “Men can't help in a job, you know. They can be induced to do it: not to help while you're doing it. At least, it makes them grumpy.” (p 224)
• “The cardinal difficulty ... in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there’.” (p 224)
• And this one, although it sounds the sort of thing that might be said today, is actually the author writing about something he condemns: “Men - complacent, patriarchal figures making arrangements for women as if women with children or bartering them like cattle. (‘And so the king promised that if anyone killed the dragon he would give him his daughter in marriage.’)” (p 152)

And there are just some interesting and even witty asides:

• “His education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote about more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow.” (p 109)
• “Everyone begins as a child by liking Weather. You learn the art of disliking it as you grow up. Haven't you ever noticed it on a snowy day? Grown-ups are all going about with long faces, but look at the children - and the dogs? They know what snow was made for.” (p 146)
• “It all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.” (p 171)
• “The whole Renaissance outburst of forbidden arts had, it seemed, been a method of losing one’s soul on singularly unfavorable terms.” (p 273)
• “Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.” (p 276)
• “From now onwards till the moment of final decision should meet him, the different men in him appeared with startling rapidity and each seemed very complete while it lasted.” (p 296)
• “One might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one has seen it.” (p 502)
• “The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.” (p 513)
• “Shakespeare never breaks the real laws of poetry ... but by following them he breaks every now and then the little regularities which critics mistake for the real laws.” (p 513)

Disappointing. October 2018; 534 pages

"C.S.Lewis: a biography" by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper

This was the surprisingly interesting biography about an Oxford don who wrote books about mediaeval literature and , following conversion, Christianity. He was mostly celibate, getting married late in life. He also wrote poetry, science fiction and the Narnia books. It is written by two men who knew him, one who was his ex-student who then went on to write children's books himself (Roger Lancelyn Green whose books about myths and legends I adored when I was a kid including: the Tales of the Greek Heroes, the Saga of Asgard, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the Adventures of Robin Hood, the Tale of Troy and, my all time favourite, the Luck of Troy) who write about themselves when they appear in the book in the third person.

It is surprising in many ways.

CSL was Irish. I'd always thought of him as so quintessentially English. His dad was a solicitor. He went to prep school and followed his elder brother to Malvern College. But whilst Warren played games and loved Malvern, 'Jack' (Clive, CS) was bookish and hated it; he was bullied and his dad took him away and put him in a crammer with a weird headteacher. Neither the law nor the military appealed so he went to Oxford (enjoying skinny dipping at Parson's Pleasure) even though he couldn't pass the maths entrance exam; he left early on to join the army to fight in WWI (when he went back to Oxford was allowed to continue despite the continuing problem with Maths because of a special rule allowing ex-soldiers to join). He was injured in WWI and carried a piece of shrapnel in his chest for twenty years.

About this time is a mysterious period. He was staying with a 'chum' and his mother and something happens about which he never later talked and excised it from his autobiography. One presumes that he fell in love with the chum's mother, Mrs Moore. After all, his own mother had died when he was young. CSL's chum then died and when CSL went back up to Oxford he took Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen with him to Oxford, renting a small house which; he moved into after his first year when he moved out of college. This was a secret from his father, who gave CSL an allowance. It made CSL poor in both money and time because she was a demanding woman. But she lived with him until she died. Did they have sex? We aren't told.

He started writing poems and studying philosophy; when he became a lecturer he started teaching English Lit. He soon gained a fellowship. Then the atheist was converted to (quite high and rather fundamental) Christianity. His first published work being poems, and his second, the Allegory of Love, about Mediaeval Literature, he now started writing Christian books. He became famous for a best-selling trilogy of science fiction books (veiled Christian myth) called Out of the Silent Planet. Then he hit the big time with the Screwtape Letters (letters from a senior to a junior devil advising how to entrap souls). He was a hit on the BBC Home Service radio giving talks about Christianity and wrote about The Problem of Pain. Then, in under two years, he wrote the seven Narnia books, again Christian allegories. He was now immensely famous but still a don who drank beer with his friend J R R Tolkien (of Hobbit and Lord of the Rings fame) at the Eagle and Child which they renamed the Bird and Baby.

His pupils included Roger Lancelyn Green and (one of his first pupils) John Betjeman.

He had a dog who, when old, didn't like eating whilst being watched so CSL would walk down the street throwing food over his shoulder. He referred to this as the Orpheus method of feeding because, if he looked round, the dog "would give him a fierce look and ignore the food" (p 123)

Oxford never offered him a professorship so at the age of 56 he accepted a Chair at Cambridge though he still lived most of the time in Oxford, taking the train on Tuesdays (presumably he went by the line that still runs past my house, although the Oxford to Milton Keynes and the Bedford to Cambridge sections have been closed).

Mr Moore died in 1951, when he was 53. Five years later he met and married an American divorcee and acquired two step sons, she died four years later from cancer and he went the same way three years after that. He died on the same day as Aldous Huxley and President Kennedy.

Moments of liminality:

• On reading Out of the Silent Planet:
• Dorothy L Sayers said of a fried "some phrase clicked in his mind" (p 165)
• Roger Lancelyn Green said a "realized in a blinding flash" (p 165)
• Doors in Narnia:
• The wardrobe (of course)
• The door Aslan draws in the air near the end of Prince Caspian
• The stable door in The Last Battle

Other trivia:
There is a brazen head mention re Friars Bacon and Bungay on p 174


CSL quotes, quoted in this book:

• "How I love kettles"
• Your best friend is you alter ego who shares "all your most secret delights". Your second friend is your "anti-self" who shares each delight but approaches each one form the opposite direction.
• We can no more meet God than Hamlet can meet Shakespeare (p 102)
• Joy and delight are "given to us to lead us into the world of the Spirit as sexual rapture is there to lead to offspring and family life." (p 120)
• To achieve 'otherness' "you must go into another dimension" (p 123)
• "Technology is per se neutral but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe." (p 173)
• God does just permit pain and suffering; he permits some people to inflict pain and suffering on others. Pain is "God's megaphone" (p 187)
• Is Aslan safe? "'Course he isn't safe. But he's good." (p 189)
• On Satan: "In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he could finds nothing more interesting than his own prestige." (p 194)
• "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." (p 195)
• "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy has been offered us." (p 203) "We are far too easily pleased" (p 204)
• If Christianity is true then some of the people we live among will go to heaven. Look around. (p 204)
• Damned souls leave "man-shaped stains on the brightness of the air." (p 222) This is a quote from The Great Divorce.

This is a brilliant and brilliantly written book. I disagree with so many things in CSL's life but at the end of the day he was a truly original thinker and this book has challenged me and made me think. April 2016; 308 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Discarded Image" by C S Lewis

This is a book about the Medieval world view written by the master of medieval literature who also happened to be the author of the Narnia books (and therefore of interest to me in my researches into liminality) and a Science fiction trilogy starting with Out of the Silent Planet.

Lewis argues that the Medieval Model, their cosmological picture of the Universe, appeared in modified form throughout their poetry, even down to Paradise Lost.

Lewis sees medieval man as fundamentally "an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems", instancing the codes of chivalry and courtly love, the Summa of Aquinas and the Divine Comedy of Dante (p 10)  but what particularly distinguished the medieval academic from those of either before or after was his heavy reliance on the written word: "They are bookish. They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue." (p 11) But Lewis is writing about literature and what he calls the "backcloth for the arts" selects from the Model of the Universe "only what is intelligible to a layman, and only what makes it appeal to imagination and emotion." (p 14)

He writes briefly about dreams. Microbius, following the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus from the 1st century AD, divides dreams into five, the first three useful (because prophetic) and 'true': (p 63)

• allegorical (p 63)
• prophetic giving a vision of the future (p 64)
• oracular: listening to someone forecasting the future (p 64)
• preoccupied: reviewing the events of the day (p 64)
• surreal including nightmares (p 64)

Lewis goes through the hierarchies of angels of pseudo-Dionysius and is very detailed about the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius but it is his side sayings that are best.

We learn, for example, that Medieval man had little sense of aporia:

• "All sense of the pathless, the baffling and the utterly alien - all agoraphobia - is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky." (p 99)
• Dante "is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea." (p 100)
• Medieval literature is swamped by the classics and 'even' Arab influences and there is very little room for old Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon influences save for some of the old romances and ballads,"things that can only live on the margins of the mind" (p 9)

There are one or two horrible bits of racism when he speaks degradingly of Africans trying to ape Western culture; he clearly thinks they are too savage.

But there are also a number of little gems:

• the Antipodes was the region where people had their feet on backwards (p 28)
• "Nothing about a literature can be more essential than the language it uses" (p 6)
• the words feigned, figment and fiction have a common root (p 65)
• as do the words 'grammar' and 'glamour' which both mean scholarship (p 187)
• "The beauty of clothes is either theirs (the richness of the stuff) or the skill of the tailor - nothing will make it ours." (p 83) ... "Nobility is only the fame ... of our ancestors' virtue." (p 84)
• "Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape." (p 101)

Overall this was a well-written and delightfully illuminating book.

March 2016; 223 pages

Read my review of the biography of C S Lewis: a tender account of a man who was first class mediaeval scholar but became a best seller in three different ways.