A pioneering psychiatrist and psychotherapist draws on the C.S. Lewis classic to argue that the fears and temptations which drive people to be violent criminals are shared by all of us

We have it on good authority (at least two popes, one saint and one poet) that Hell is a state of mind that any of us might find ourselves in. My working life as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist in prisons and places like Broadmoor, where some of the inmates have committed the most appalling crimes, has convinced me that they are right. And 80 years ago, a pipe-smoking Oxford don and Christian convert gave us an astonishingly vivid insight into what being in Hell might actually be like.

This was C.S. Lewis, best-known for his Narnia novels, who in The Screwtape Letters imagines a senior devil in the Infernal Civil Service giving an incompetent trainee devil advice about how best to tempt a person away from the Christian path, and, in so doing, to drag them into the cold nothingness of ­separation from God. This, for Lewis, is the meaning of Hell.

Appearing first as a column in The Guardian, The Screwtape Letters was published in book form in spring 1942. There were eight reprints within the year, and it has never been out of print. Letters were still the mainstay of personal communication in the mid-twentieth century, and Lewis was a well practised and prolific letter writer. He gave generously of his time and advice in his correspondence, especially to friends (with whom he would conduct long written debates), to aspiring writers and those seeking spiritual advice. He made a point of writing back to everyone who wrote to him (which became fairly burdensome as his fame grew). Lewis became something of an epistolary expert, and he put that to good use in different books, including The Screwtape Letters.