the story of the friendships, mutual influence, and common purpose of the Inklings - the literary circle which congregated around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Meeting in pubs or Lewis's college rooms, they included an influential array of literary figures. They were, claimed poet and novelist John Wain, bent on 'the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life'.

Tolkien and Lewis expert Colin Duriez unpacks the Inklings' origins, relationships, and the nature of their collaboration. He shows how they influenced, encouraged, and moulded each other. Duriez also covers the less celebrated Inklings, neglected, he claims, for too long.

What did they owe - and offer - to the more acknowledged names? What brought them together? And what, eventually, drove them apart from their initial focus upon each other's writings?