I was looking for handbooks to tragedy. And, in A Grief Observed, the widowed discover that Lewis has charted this frozen land of total absence as exactly as he did the map of Narnia.

William Nicholson, who worked in the BBC current affairs department in the 1980s, aspired to be a screenwriter but the green light never quite shone on his projects. So he found a round about route by persuading the religious documentary series Everyman to divert some of its budget into fictions concerned with faith or ethics. The first – Martin Luther: Heretic (1983) – starred Jonathan Pryce as the Protestant revolutionary. Two years later came Shadowlands, turning on a crisis of faith in the life of the Christian writer C.S. Lewis (Joss Ackland) who, as a bachelor in his late 50s, fell in love with Joy Davidman Gresham (Claire Bloom), a Jewish American double divorcee who had written to him about his Narnia trilogy and other books.

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