Hardy was born in London in 1949 and educated at Lancing College, where his contemporaries included Christopher Hampton and Tim Rice.

[4] Hardy's first edited volume was a collection of writings by Arnold Mallinson, an eccentric Oxford clergyman with whom he lodged for seven years.

[9] Isaiah Berlin, though a towering intellectual figure at the time of his death, was at one stage not regarded as having published very extensively.

[10] In 1990 Hardy abandoned his career in publishing to work full-time on Berlin's unpublished essays, lectures, and correspondence.

The second part consists of Hardy’s own philosophical response to Berlin’s theories on matters such as plurality, religious belief and our shared human nature.

[16] 'And unprinted [they have] largely remained, though Bowra did give occasional after-dinner readings to carefully chosen friends.

'[15] This situation changed when Henry Hardy found a cache of Bowra's poems as he was working through the papers of Isaiah Berlin.

[15][17] Hardy, working with Jennifer Holmes, set about completing this project, adding poems from other sources, including Wadham College's Bowra papers.

Hardy was unable to include all of Bowra’s poems in 2005: two, written in 1950,[19] remained unprintable: 'This was because their subject was still alive, and was unwilling to give his approval for their inclusion in his lifetime.

'[20] Fermor died in June 2011, and Hardy and Morwood published the two offending poems in the Wadham Gazette in December that year.