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Full House Follies

This little book is intended to correct the popular impression that “progress and increasing complexity” are characteristics of life’s course on Earth. Progress has, in the twentieth century, already been punched silly; but paleontologists seem genuinely more complex than paramecia, a point that Gould concedes, if only for reasons of professional pride. His doubts arise whenever the twig of a trend Read More ›

Walter Hooper Says Now A Grief Observed Is True

In C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, released by Harper Collins in the fall of 1996, Walter Hooper abruptly reverses his claim that Lewis’s Grief Observed is fiction. (See pp. 194-201.) Without any explanation, he includes Grief in his autobiography section and vouches for its historical accuracy. Until now Hooper has always insisted that Grief is strictly imaginative and that Read More ›

A New Oxford Mystery

Jane Langton is the successful author of a dozen breezy detective novels featuring an American academic named Homer Kelly. She illustrates them with her excellent drawings. The Dante Game (1991) tells about a new American School for Florentine Studies, where Kelly is teaching Dante. “Boston’s detective-turned-Harvard-professor is hard at work in Dante’s divine but deadly Florence.” Langton quotes frequently from Read More ›

Some of Walter Hooper’s Inclusions and Omissions

In C.S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, careful readers find a few surprising inclusions and omissions. For example, Hooper tells about the Miramar Hotel in Boomemouth where the Tolkiens stayed on vacations, and lists it in his index -although it has nothing to do with Lewis. He gives an entire paragraph to the life of Fritz Gasch who married Lewis’s illustrator Read More ›

Left out of Legacy 70, p. 8

6. Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). Essays on literature and education. Long unavailable except from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. In Xerographic edition. Contents:”Shelley, Dryden and Mr. Eliot,” ‘William Morris.” “The Idea of an ‘English School,”‘ “Our English Syllabus,” “High and Low Brows,” “The Alliterative Metre,” “Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare,” “Variations In Shakespeare and Others.” Read More ›

Why We Tell Whoppers

Gordon Monson, The Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1992 Psychiatrists say compulsive liars one researcher estimates they account for up to 5% of the population suffer from a personality disorder that leads them not just to tell lies but to try to live those lies as well. “A lot of these people try to rewrite their personal history,” says Bryan Read More ›

More Hooper Anecdotes

Walter Hooper’s 1991 essay “C.S. Lewis: The Man and His Thought” is largely a collection of Hooper’s anecdotes old and new. “…I became ‘The Soldier Who Had Heard from C.S. Lewis’ ….” After ringing the doorbell of the Kilns, “My heart was beating so hard I had to lean against the wall.” “It was this joke [concerning Lewis’s bathroom], as Read More ›

Lewis on Dante, Communion, Austen and the Moonies

More on Lewis on Dante On 22 November 1931 C.S. Lewis wrote to Warren: “Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Hardie (another English don] comes and reads Dante with me, and every second Monday when the college literary society meets.” (Lewis also expressed his opinion of writers like Dante: “To read histories of literature, one would Read More ›

From Warren Lewis to an American Correspondent

From Warren Lewis to an American Correspondent (Ralph Blair recently purchased Mr. Lofstrom’s set of Lewis letters from a dealer.) [In Upper right corner] SI, Ringwood Rd.,Risinghurst,Headington,Oxford. 12th January 1967. Dear Mr. Lofstrom, Many thanks for your kind and encouraging letter of the 9th. It gives me real pleasure to know that you and Mrs. Lofstrom have got something out Read More ›