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“... damage. Among those who appeared there from time to time with a guest evidently not his wife was Rupert Hart-Davis. He was unique among those couples, with their faintly clandestine air, in boldly underlining his presence within the pub by parking outside the entrance a publisher’s van on the side of which was inscribed in large letters: ...”

“... We now have the sixth and final volume of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters. George Lyttelton died on 1 May 1962, thus ending a correspondence which had begun in 1955; the first of the volumes edited by the survivor was published in 1978, the rest have appeared at intervals since. ‘For beginners’, as Rupert Hart-Davis puts it, mindful of those who have had to pick up the thread at some intermediate stage of the correspondence, the editor ‘had been taught by George at Eton, where he was an outstanding teacher and house-master ...”

“... is not for pen to write or paper to record.’ Yet pen wrote it and paper recorded it, even so. Rupert Hart-Davis does not reprint much of the correspondence about Wilde, rightly thinking it available elsewhere, but he does publish the touching letter Max wrote to Robert Ross, Oscar’s premier initiator, when he was in New York with his ...”

“... One of the many excellent photographs Barry Webb has assembled shows Blunden going out to bat with Rupert Hart-Davis, in a match between Jonathan Cape and the Alden Press. That was in 1938. Blunden looks miniature, a frail determined Don Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were unsporting ...”

“... and he is posted first to Litherland and then to Craiglockhart War Hospital, the diary stops. Hart-Davis does not make it clear whether Sassoon destroyed any diary he might have kept at that time. He says merely that ‘from this point there is no surviving diary until December,’ and he adds that the outline of the missing months can be sketched in by ...”

“... an old acquaintance of Sassoon’s, still cuts a dignified figure; it was indeed only in 1925, as Rupert Hart-Davis tells us in one of his meticulous (and most helpful) footnotes, that this ‘critic, biographer and man of letters’, born in 1849, was knighted. Frank Schuster (1840-1928), ‘wealthy musiclover and giver of parties’, was still giving ...”

“... Deutsch’s bed, and then at his right hand when he needed a factotum. Philip Ziegler’s life of Rupert Hart-Davis (2004) was kindly received for perhaps the same reason. ‘I’m not really “au fond” a publisher at all,’ Hart-Davis told a friend. ‘I’m really some sort of literary bloke, who likes ...”

“... of politics, music and journalism in which Shaw moved. Weintraub is not as immaculate an editor as Rupert Hart-Davis, nor his match as a stylist (in one footnote he refers to Shaw’s ‘massive disinterest in Scottish music’), but he comes close to rivalling Hart-Davis’s superb annotation of Oscar Wilde’s ...”

“... whose head is compared to that of Veronese’s equerry, is echoed in Prince’s late portrait of Rupert Brooke, which lingers over the soldier-poet’s ‘bare-throated profile with the tumbled bright young hair’, and decides that he is ‘beautiful/As with a woman’s beauty, and yet masculine’. It’s a beauty that is consecrated and preserved by ...”

“... is essentially Mr Laurence’s own work, should be treated as an exception. His dedication to Rupert Hart-Davis and his wife is a fitting vote of thanks to the man who (as the letters to George Lyttleton indicate) has encouraged him since the mid-1950s. In future, such labour as this must increasingly be supplied by technology. The ‘bog, clay and ...”

“... In the middle of the first decade of this century, there were, of course, rumours of wars, and Russia had just been convulsed by revolution. Though German lager was a well-loved tipple in London nightspots, Britons were bound to wonder if Germany wasn’t winning the worldwide battle for markets and whether conflict with her could be avoided: meanwhile, the British Empire seemed at its zenith and Kipling and Newbolt were the most flourishing poets of the day ...”

“... with all her friends, many of them mutual friends of whose discomfiture she was oblivious. To Rupert Hart-Davis she wrote that Cecil and his wife were ‘like two wheels of a bicycle propelling the stark frame of their life together, never meeting’. It is a good image. Hastings, who is a sympathetic but not an indulgent biographer, knows when to ...”

“... The first two months of 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love ...”