CS Lewis's magical children's classic is about to light up the big screen, but behind the fantasy lies a real-life tale of loss, quest and salvation. Boyd Tonkin looks at the writer's personal journey. Let's clear up one popular misconception at the start. It was not CS Lewis who, at one of the regular readings of new work in the ale-and-pipe tobacco fug of the Eagle and Child pub in wartime Oxford, groaned in response to the arrival of yet another of JRR Tolkien's mythic sprites: "Oh no; another f*ing elf." That was their mutual friend Hugo Dyson, professor of English at Reading University and fellow member of the informal coterie of donnish, Christian yarn-spinners who called themselves the "Inklings". [More]