The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters: Volume IV: 1959

In 1959, 51-year-old Hart-Davis continued his gentlemanly but hard-working activities as a publisher, editor and reporter on London literary gossip, and his 76-year-old country-living former Eton master went on reading widely and delivering weekly opinions. In their letters, among the myriad subjects they tossed at one another as lightly as frisbees were fiction (""If Dreiser's the great American novelist, give me the Marx Brothers every time''); poets (Laurence Housman was ``a tiresome old cissy''); people with squeaky voices (Arnold Bennett, Bismarck, H. G. Wells); politics (``Apart from football, is there anything more boring than an election?''); Eddie Marsh (``Perhaps impotence has its own brand of silliness''); the conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent (the ``wicked knight'' best recalled as ``Flash Harry''); and Winston Churchill (to his cabinet, on an unexpectedly large expenditure: ``Gentlemen, you can't manure a ten-acre field with a fart''). Alas, only two more delightful volumes to come. (June)