Editing Rupert Hart-Davis (section)

===Author===
As [[Hugh Walpole]]'s literary executor, and being unable to find a potential biographer who would tackle the job to his satisfaction, Hart-Davis proposed to Walpole's publishers, [[Macmillan Publishers|Macmillan]], that he should write the biography himself, to which [[Harold Macmillan]] replied that he couldn't think of a better person to do it.<ref>Hart-Davis, Volume 2, letter of 12 January 1957</ref> When ''Hugh Walpole'' was published in 1952, it was praised as "among the half dozen best biographies of the century".<ref>Lehmann, [[J. I. M. Stewart]]'s chapter on biography</ref> It has been reissued several times.
[[File:L-HD-Letters-spines.png|thumb|upright|The 6 volumes of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters]]
Hart-Davis wrote no more books until after his retirement from publishing, but between 1955 and 1962, he wrote about a quarter of a million words to his old schoolmaster [[George William Lyttelton|George Lyttelton]], which, together with Lyttelton's similar contribution, made up the six volumes of the [[Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters]], published between 1978 and 1984 after Lyttelton's death. Although he spent much of his life researching old letters, Hart-Davis destroyed the originals of the letters after his edited versions of them had been printed.<ref>Ziegler, p. 269</ref> He was equally unscholarly about his uncle Duff Cooper's diaries, whose frankness shocked him so much that he wanted to destroy them.<ref>Norwich, introduction, p. ix</ref>

In retirement, Hart-Davis wrote three volumes of autobiography entitled ''The Arms of Time'' (1979), ''The Power of Chance'' (1991) and ''Halfway to Heaven'' (1998). The first, a particularly cherished project, was a memoir of his beloved mother Sybil, who died young, to her son's desolation.<ref name=times79/>