In 1944, the broadcast time was moved to 10.20 p.m. (“Who the devil is going to listen to anything at 10.20?” Lewis wrote in jocular indignation to his producer, Eric Fenn). That meant that Lewis had to catch the midnight train to Oxford, getting home at about three o’clock in the morning. Lewis wrote that literature enables us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts”. But “every paradise is a paradise lost,” Marcel Proust wrote; or, as Robert Frost’s poem puts it, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”. Suzannah Lipscomb is a professor emerita of the University of Roehampton; a senior member of St Cross College, Oxford, and the host of the Not Just the Tudors podcast from History Hit.
