Belonging and not belonging

Nicola Lacey wanted to write an ‘intellectual biography’ of Herbert Hart, on the model of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. It’s a tall order. How to cope with the fact that the philosophy of law is even harder to understand than Virginia Woolf’s novels? And though an academic lawyer like Lacey is the best person to understand Hart’s ideas, is she the best person to explain them to us? Is she the best person, indeed, to write a biography which should be scholarly underneath but ‘accessible’ (Lacey’s academic word for it) on the surface?

Since I raise these questions you will guess that I am not about to answer them all in favour of The Nightmare and the Noble Dream. So I should say first that I did very much enjoy reading this book. Partly that was because it included one of the best times of my own life, Oxford in the Sixties, where I had Jenifer Hart as a tutor.