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November the 22nd, 1963 was quite a day for the obituary writers.

First Alders Huxley, then John F. Kennedy, and in between them both, Clive

Stapels Lewis, C.S. Lewis, the subject of today's great lives.

All three deaths occurred within little over an hour and JFK's assassination

inevitably overshadowed the other two. Years later, one member of Lewis's family said that he, Lewis, would have enjoyed the privacy.

But CS Lewis has not been forgotten.

The creator of the Chronicles of Narnia continues to attract attention in the United States as much as here.

His books and his thoughts on Christianity are almost as popular and debated as ever they were.

With me, nominating Lewis is the historian and broadcaster, Susanna Lipscomb.

She's a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, tweets under the name of a 16th century girl,

and soon she'll be appearing on TV with a new series about Elizabeth I. But C.S. Lewis, tell us why you've nominated him as a great life. I wouldn't have guessed that you've been

nominating CS Lewis. Yes, in fact saying that he's my great life is like owning up

to a sort of secret of my deep heart really. He was somebody who knew how to

approach the past on its own terms, but it's also above all that he married

imagination with reason. So early in my life reading Narnia and then later... Gosh I don't know pretty

young so we had storyteller tapes when I was growing up. We listened to Michael Horton and his recordings of the Narnia, but they're a bridge, but they're beautiful and they've got lovely classical music in the background. And my mother read to us every night, so that Narni books were fairly early and then

gradually moving into his other work in the sort of imaginative world of the screw-take

letters or the great divorce or perylandra and then much later knowing him through his work on the 16th century and of course along the way some of his Christian apologetics.

Let's start just to remind ourselves of the writer that we're talking about with a bit lots of people will know.

Lucy and the lion, the witch and the wardrobe.

Would you like to read this little bit, Susanna?

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