A surfeit of anniversaries this week reminded us that on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, C.S. Lewis (born 1898) and Aldous Huxley (born 1894) also died. Three such different figures are hard to imagine — Kennedy, the wily politician, Lewis, the tortured academic, Huxley the cool intellectual. Lewis is the one whose image and personality don’t fit; a man who appears cast from a different age from Kennedy and also from Huxley, who you can well imagine wielding an iPod and Twitter account. Yet it’s the pipe-smoking, tweed-suited Lewis who has been given the celebrity treatment this week, while the coolly cynical Huxley has been silenced, with not a feature or reading to be heard.
Lewis, of course, was connected with Tolkien and still scores highly because of the current fad for fantasy worlds and mock-epic battles between good and evil. Book of the Week, though, did not give us, as you might have expected, something from Narnia but rather Lewis’s spoof conversations between Lucifer and one of his minions — The Screwtape Letters.
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