Friendship and Its Discontents

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I am aware that when Christians become especially close to one another we tend not to refer to them as friends: rather, we follow the biblic...

The Weight of Glory

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"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person ...

Literary Fashion

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A lot of people remember the bliss of their earliest reading with a pang; their current encounters with books offer no more than faint echo...

Down the pub with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (II)

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[The New Building, Magdalen College, Oxford] It's called the New Building because it was built in 1733, about 250 years after most of ...

Down the pub with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (I)

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The original ending in the Shire… There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings . To recap: the stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, h...

Walking with God

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"Let us suppose that we are doing a mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to the top of a cliff where we a...
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The Worm Ouroboros

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In 1922, E.R. Eddison published his first novel The Worm Ourobouros , a novel of daring adventures and dastardly treachery set in a never-ne...
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The Splendid Century

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What can you say about a book that gives you Louis XIV sitting on the grass at Versailles carrying on a conversation with a little girl? Thi...

Men without Chests

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I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books. That is why I have chosen as the starting-point fo...

Love, the Pope, and C.S. Lewis

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For Augustine, St. Thomas, and their followers, caritas , or charity, is the highest form of love. It is an infused theological virtue, incl...

T.S. Eliot on Charles Williams

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For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. Had I ever to spend a night in a haunted house, I should have fe...
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New Learning and New Ignorance

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One thing is certain. It felt very unlike being a 'puritan' such as we meet in nineteenth-century fiction. Dickens's Mrs. Clenna...

Lay (excerpt)

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THE moonlight over Radcliffe Square, Small sunset spires that drowse and dream, Thin bells that ring to evening prayer. Red willow-roots alo...

After Prayers, Lie Cold

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Arise my body, my small body, we have striven Enough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven. Arise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go, W...

True Cultivation?

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What were the qualities which the good tutor would look for, instil, and cultivate in his pupil in the year 1680? Firstly, physical courage,...

The Clerk

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The clerk sat on a stool And added up a column, Looking a very fool, Staid he was and solemn. He said : ' Nineteen and one, Mark nought...

Goblin Feet

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I am off down the road Where the fairy lanterns glowed And the little pretty flittermice are flying : A slender band of grey It runs creepil...
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The Loss of Youth?

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After tea another walk... While I was hesitating in the wet grey twilight, a corncrake started up in a field of young wheat, and no nighting...

The Meteorite

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Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone. Th...

"Dyson and Tolkien showed me..."

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Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all; again, that if ...
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