The Lyttelton
Hart-Davis Letters
Introduction
Editions
NOTES
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Volume IV
Volume V
Volume VI
Volume VII
e-mail
About the
Lyttelton Hart-Davis letters
and
this site

In March 2002, The Atlantic's New and Noteworthy column had a short item by Michael Dirda on the occasion of the publication of a selection of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis letters, describing with great enthusiasm the seven volumes of their correspondence. It begins,

One evening in October of 1955 a retired Eton schoolmaster, George Lyttelton, and a former pupil, the middle-aged London publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, agreed to exchange letters once a week. The correspondence lasted for seven years. When it was published in six volumes (in the 1970s and 1980s), it was widely acclaimed as "superb," "profoundly satisfying," "crusty," and "civilized." I would be somewhat more enthusiastic: The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters are, at least for those of an old-fashioned literary bent, the most delightful bedside books of our time.

Wherever one chooses to read them, the Letters have retained their appeal over time, though the references in them become increasingly obscure. These notes, compiled by Matt Richards and edited and web-mastered by Victoria Harding, provide information the correspondents each knew the other had, and are intended to increase the pleasure of reading the Letters on into the future.
lhdletters@inwriting.org