More than Writers

I don’t suppose many ACW blog readers get to see the Journal of Inklings Studies . It’s understandably quite expensive, and rather erudite. I have just been lent a copy of the April 2016 volume, which contains a wonderful article by A. O. J. Cockshut, ‘C. S. Lewis in Post-War Oxford’. There’s only space to share a few titbits, but here we go. After setting the scene in 1945, the author describes Lewis. ‘I have never to this day seen a man of high intellectual attainments who so little looked the part’, he says. He appeared to be dressed in gardening clothes; was thickset with very ruddy cheeks,  a heavy jaw, and dull eyes; and resembled someone you might find propping up a bar. But when he spoke ‘one heard .. a great blast of sound, rapid, eloquent, allusive, and witty’. Describing Lewis’s teaching, Cockshut avers ‘I can say without hesitation that Lewis was the best lecturer that I ever heard.’ When he lectured on medieval authors such as Chaucer and Langland he took ...