According to the July/August 1998 issue of Columbia Journalism Review, the Stephen Glass saga may be the biggest hoax in modern journalism. Glass has been described as an unusually affable and likable but insecure person who needs constant affirmation. In 1994 he worked for Heritage Institute’s Policy Review, where he published six articles. He was a bright, prolific young reporter Read More ›
In his July 1999 fundraising letter Stan Mattson reported that he has recently received two foundation grants and several very generous gifts from individuals; but the net financial surplus from Oxbridge ’98 was only $8.80 per person, and it took time away from other fundraising activities. He says that over 800 attended, which means total surplus from tuition was only Read More ›
When I first read Screwtape Letters, I was studying sociology in graduate school. But something was missing. I knew something was missing, but I didn’t know what it was. Then I read Screwtape, and bingo, here was more understanding of what it means to be human in one slim volume than in all the great sociological tomes I had been Read More ›
The fictitious MacPhee varies greatly in three novels attributed to C. S.Lewis. In the first, Perelandra (1943), his name is spelled McPhee and he is mentioned only once: “… a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment, and he was pressing Read More ›
In the summer of 1999 a handsome sign was posted in Thornton’s secondhand book shop on Broad Street, Oxford: ROOMS TO LET C.S. Lewis’ Former HomeThe Kilns, HeadingtonTelephone Oxford: 741865 or 767689E-Mail: kilnsemail@aol.comShare this six bedroom fully furnished home with five others.Monthly rent from 250-350Tenancy Period: 1 August, 1999 – 30 June, 2000 Behind the words was a faint background Read More ›
According to the April 1999 issue of World Press Review, the Guatemalan Quice Indian who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 had fabricated the events in her 1983 book I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Menchu’s coauthor, a Venezuelan anthropologist named Elisabeth Burgos, says she realized by 1990 that much of the story was fabricated. (For example, Read More ›
In answer to the announcement that there is post-1950 ink on the 1938 manuscript of The Dark Tower, HarperCollins and Douglas Gresham (official spokesman for C S Lewis Pte) suddenly announced in 1998 that C. S. Lewis did not write the story in 1938 after all; he wrote it circa 1958. (That would place it 14 years after That Hideous Read More ›
The following hoax fools many people. “I received a telephone call today from an individual identifying himself as an AT&T Service Technician who was conducting a test on our telephone lines. He stated that to complete the test I should touch nine (9), zero (0), the pound sign (#) and then hang up. Luckily, I was suspicious and refused. Upon Read More ›
by James O’Fee Lewis’s fiction is partly biographical. Lewis’s Ransom resembles another philologist, J. R. Tolkien, and the influence of Tolkien on Lewis is well-known. Not so well-known is the debt that Lewis owed to his private tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was a freethinker and atheist, although he had once qualified as a Minister in the Irish Presbyterian Church. Read More ›
I am fond of looking up novels on amazon.com and reading random reviews ,but I must say, that kind of anonymous forum is a real breeding ground for mini-hoaxes. Peter Brooks, one of my professors at Yale, recently wrote a novel. Out of curiosity I checked the reviews, and the headings of two of them contained the names of people Read More ›