Charles Williams

A lively and readable literary biography of a remarkable personality who was a central member of the Inklings, working closely with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in wartime Oxford. The book rediscovers the dramatic and contradictory life of a brilliant writer and publisher from a poor London background who became a ground-breaking theologian, fantasy novelist and poet but was also a member of occult groups, experimenting with magic and becoming a guru to a body ofdevoted followers. Based on intimate documents and letters, many of them embargoed until recently, it vividly recreates the public and private worlds of a charismatic and contradictory figure who wasfascinating, brilliant and deeply disturbing by turns. It is perhaps the strangest story in twentieth-century English literature.