Customer Reviews

Lyttelton Hart-Davies Letters 1955-1962: A Selection

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Culled from the six famous volumes, this selection is superbly edited and wonderfully engaging. It would be the ideal bedside book were the correspondence not so addictive. I couldn't resist taking it up to fill any free moment. One could do far worse than eavesdrop on this charming friendship. In fact, to read even just this selection is to form a lasting friendship with the correspondents--who will recommend many worthwhile reads.

Warning: I expect that, like me, you will be compelled to purchase the original volumes (available with slight difficulty from Academy Chicago Publishers). In all, a delicious read.

I have to confess I am only half way through, and it is late at night, but I cannot go to bed without telling **someone** how wonderful this book is. I think it rather like developing a perversion in old age: such a passion is a bit odd, but you no longer care what others think of you, and you're thrilled out of your knickers to have such a new delight so late in life.

I'm actually galloping through the book, the sooner to start back at the beginning with some afternoons to myself and a fast connection to the internet, the better to google each and every reference, to look up every unknown word, and to learn more about my old friends Johnson and Tennyson and Homer and Blunden and Duff Cooper (and on and on) plus getting to know a whole host of new friends.

Every page holds an outloud laugh, an "I must tell X about this one", an "oh, let me email that to my brother", a new association, and a bit of bitter sweetness. Even if there is nothing on the page bitter sweet, you feel it anyway that these fine men are gone, and never the chance to rub elbows with them. Alas, I am not as clever as they, and cannot find the words to convey all the merry ups and downs the letters take you on.

And best of all, I have the full volumes to look forward to and collect.

Entertaining correspondence between publisher and literary biographer, Rupert Hart-Davis, and his old Eton English master, George Lyttelton. This is a selection of letters between the two men from the originally published six volumes in the 1970s. At that time, the correspondence was hailed as a great civilized work, but this was probably heaping too much praise on it. The work was later spoofed in Craig Brown's Marsh Marlowe Letters. Many of the letters contain interesting comments on writers which reflected their great love of literature. The letters also contain gossip about friends and comments about famous figures. This was an enjoyable read, but it is recommended that the letters be "dipped" into periodically rather than reading them straight through.