Do we have Elizabeth Anscombe to thank for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

When it comes to famous clashes of philosophers, Cambridge has Wittgenstein's poker and Oxford has the night that Elizabeth Anscombe bested C.S. Lewis in debate.

Reviewing A.N. Wilson's biography for the London Review of Books back in 1990, C.H. Sisson took seriously the idea that this rout had much to do with Lewis's turn to writing for children:

Lewis was unpopular ‘in the English Faculty in Oxford, and indeed in the University at large’. ‘He disliked his colleagues at Magdalen.’ ‘Even colleagues who were Christians ... noticed that his variety of Christianity did not extend to meekness, or even necessarily to politeness.’ 

A notable debate took place in 1948 in the Socratic Club, when Elizabeth Anscombe – represented by Wilson as being as tough and unscrupulous in argument as Lewis himself – ‘thoroughly trounced’ him in argument, and showed up his inadequacy as a philosopher. 

This occasion seems to have had an extravagant effect on Lewis, arousing ‘not least’, according to Wilson, ‘his fear of women’. ‘Once the bullying hero of the hour had been cut down to size, he became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch-like dimensions.’ 

Lewis, who is said to have preferred boys’ books in the second half of his life, became a real – if perhaps somewhat unwholesome – success as a children’s writer with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘being stung back into childhood’, Wilson plausibly informs us, by his defeat at the Socratic Club.

Going back to Popper for a moment, his reply to Wittgenstein was surely a joke. A joke by Popper sounds like no laughing matter, but I have been told that he was very aware when writing in English that it was his second language, so concentrated above all on making himself clear. His writing in German, by contrast, can be wittier and more allusive.

Elizabeth Anscombe and her philosopher husband Peter Geach eventually retired to Bishop's Castle in Shropshire, where Geaches can be found to this day. Anscombe was an acolyte of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophy dominated the second half of the 20th century.

So was Norman Malcolm, who agreed with a point I made in the after-dinner discussion when we had him as a guest of out philosophy society at York. If felt like a laying on of hands from Wittgenstein himself - I get much the same feeling when Frank Muir's son applauds one of my witticisms on Bluesky.

A 1963 television report on the satire boom by Bryan Magee

Now here's a find: a 1963 report on the satire boom by this blog's hero Bryan Magee.

We see John Bird, Jeremy Geidt, Peter Cook, Bernard Braden, Willie Rushton, Jonathan Miller and Michael Frayn.

I can't recall Braden being discussed as part of the satire boom before, and the most obscure name now is Jeremy Geidt, who is seen in the sketch with John Bird. He went to have an influential career in American theatre and his background was more establishment than that of anyone else in the programme.

Peter Cook is notable bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, while Frank Muir describes Magee as looking like "a bit like a young family doctor in a cough mixture commercial". I'm not sure that Magee's thesis that satire is at once centuries old and a bubble that is about to burst quite hangs together.

Muir is there because this is an off-air recording from a 1992 episode of TV Heaven where he chose the items included.

Thanks to Mario Ricciardi on Bluesky.