Harrison Ford

Exactly that.

I was wanting to have a conversation with Lewis and with the other members of the Inklings, his writing circle, who through the period of the war were writing these cosmic thrillers

motivated by, I think, a very similar sense that there was something unearthly about the ruined city, a way in which it seemed quite natural for people to be pushed to the familiar edges of their experience and then beyond it into something unearthly or magical.

But also I had a specific...

Loving argument I wanted to have with C.S.

Lewis because I am a devotee of the Narnia books.

I have been since I was a child.

But because I love him, I'm allowed to be annoyed with him as well.

And I wanted to pick up specifically the notoriously unfair bit at the end of the last Narnia book in which the character Susan is not allowed to join in with the happy ending because, as it says, she's interested in nothing nowadays but nylons, lipsticks and invitations.

Yeah.

And ever since, people have been trying to find a kind of spiritual meaning for what Lewis had done there.

And maybe there is one.

But there's also, I think, very clearly a kind of bachelor incomprehension or even distaste for the lives of young women.

So I knew that I wanted to write a fantasy set then which very deliberately had –

As its protagonist finding her way into wonder, somebody who is really strongly in favour of nylons, lipsticks and invitations and everything they represent.

Although my protagonist Iris would prefer silk if she can get her hands on it.

There was a distinct kind of vein of pro-fascist sentiment in the British upper classes, partly because, as in other bits of Europe, Germany, Italy, the Great Depression had shook people's faith that kind of liberal democracy could do the business and cure the ills of the present day.

But also because they liked order and hierarchy and they could see those things disappearing in

in the modern world.

Again, one of the strange things to get your head around is that for the first nine months of the Second World War, British fascists were operating completely unimpeded.