Anyone who entitles an essay, “Enchanting England”, gets my attention immediately! I long for it passionately! Of course, a PR consultant hired by a tourist promotion company in England, will be tasked with doing exactly that. A mythology of England needs to be created in order to sell a place to visitors. A couple of years ago a resident of a particularly pretty Cotswold village was asked to move his car, parked in front of his own cottage, because it was spoiling the view and the photographs for visiting tourists. What if tourists were asked to do something much more radical? To seek “the dearest freshness deep down things” as poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins put it and that Chesterton also encouraged? Well, the PR consultant would lose his job because you could find this without having to leave your front porch!
I loved this piece by Prof Moore, written in conjunction with the publication of The Inklings and King Arthur, and I warmly recommend it to you as well. And the essay on Chesterton and King Arthur is worth reading too, as I did in the past week.