Descent into Hell is a complex portrait of the relationship between the living and the dead. It's a book of apologetics written in the style of horror. And it's a book about acceptance. Continue Reading »
Charles Williams: The Third Inklingby grevel lindopoxford, 464 pages, $34.95 C harles Williams (1886–1945) was a cult figure in his lifetime, and he remains one. The word “cult” here describes someone who cannot easily be judged by conventional standards of literary taste. His seven novels, . . . . Continue Reading »
The name they chose for their group was, J. R. R. Tolkien self-effacingly recalls, “a pleasantly ingenious pun . . . suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.” The description conjures a picture of “donnish dreaminess,” a rag-tag band of tweed-clad writers who met for a pint from time to time. Continue Reading »
It is often assumed that G. K. Chesterton and J. R .R. Tolkien were reactionary, antimodern writers. In a certain sense they were. Tolkien regarded nearly everything worthy of praise in English culture to have ended in 1066. He scorned the imposition of Norman culture on a vibrant English tradition . . . . Continue Reading »
By the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes . . . . Continue Reading »
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