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Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898 and became a renowned scholar of medieval English, in which he lectured, first at Oxford and then at Cambridge. He also wrote widely on that subject, but as an author is now best known for his religious writings, including such books as Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters and The Chronicles of Narnia.

He was also a prolific writer of essays on many subjects to do with faith and life, and although they have been published in various collections over the years, this present volume is the first time that they have all been brought together. To make for ease of reading I have tried to put them into logical sections, but in some cases an essay could happily fall into at least two, such was Lewis’s breadth of approach, and within each section the essays are generally listed chronologically. There is a short introductory history for each one, including details of the latest collection in which it has been published, and at the front of the book there is a list of titles, with publication dates, of all the books mentioned as sources.

For all this background information, as for so much else to do with the works of C.S. Lewis, I am greatly indebted to Walter Hooper, whose C.S. Lewis–A Companion and Guide gives full details of all Lewis’s writings, including of course his essays. I have also largely kept the helpful footnotes which he added for those reading the essays many years after they were written. One small addition should be a note about The Guardian, which was a religious magazine rather than the national newspaper now known by that name.

Lewis was writing over a long period, from the 1920s to shortly before his death in 1963, and the world has changed a great deal since then. For many people there is no firm religious background to life, and new mass communications have brought influences from all kinds of ideologies into our very homes, all presented with lavish and impressive marketing techniques, some of which we don’t even realize may be changing the way we think. When Lewis made the broadcasts which were to form Mere Christianity Britain was at war, and his words came as a firm foundation to people who were looking for a faith to steady their lives. In reading them again I was struck by how directly they still speak to us at the turn of the century, despite having been written in that very different world of some fifty years ago.

Lesley Walmsley