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Lacey has done a superb job. A highly readable narrative. Valuable achievement' - London Review of Books
'A book which brilliantly relates Hart's personal life to his academic achievements. Lacey has a remarkable ability to explain both the intellectual issues, his ideas about them, and the objections that have been raised by his views.' -TLS
By unravelling a life the intensity and gravity of which no one, not even his wife and colleagues, had imagined... Lacey's biography sheds new light on the origins and the depth of Hart's work... A life of H.L.A Hart is a concise and extremely well organized biography irrispite of being a very rich and full one... In spite of its dense content, the biography's prose is clear and fluent throughout, in a style of which Hart would have approved, and this makes it extremely enjoyable to read.' - Samantha Besson, German Law Journal
in retrospect of what she found in Hart's diaries, she seemed the perfect person to take on his biography... she tried to "bring alive on the page the complicated, very human man whom so many readers of his academic work think of as impersonal icon."' - Samantha Besson, German Law Journal
This fascinating and touching biography's secreet lies in a unique intergenerational encounter that turned into a rich, albeit posthumous, human relationship between one of the twentieth century's most brilliant legal philosophers and a younger fellow jurisprude who is most probably one of the most perceptive feminist legal theorists of her generation.' - Samantha Besson, German Law Journal
And the wonderful thing is Professor Lacey never sells Hart s ideas short, never underestimates the content of his work both as a jurist and as a public intellectual even while she brings his family, his circle of friends, and his personality to life. We end up learning as much about secondary rules in the law as we learn about wartime espionage and the lucid prose of this biography makes them both into an enjoyable and profitable experience.' - Jeremy Waldron, Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law and Philosophy, Columbia University
Outstanding biography. He deserves a perceptive biography, and Nicola LAcey has proided one.' -TLS
For me, a biography addict, this is certainly the biography of 2004' - Baroness Warnock, The Times Higher Education Supplement
impressive new biography' - Noel Malcolm, The Sunday Telegraph Review
This is a stunning achievement. Nicola Lacey has thrown a wonderful light, not only on H.L.A. Hart, the man his life, his marriage, his war-work, his sexuality, his self-doubt, his experience of anti-Semitism but also on the Oxford of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and by extension the circle of friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in New York, in Jerusalem, and all over the world in whose company he developed his ideas and made his massive contribution to jurisprudence.' - Jeremy Waldron, Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law and Philosophy, Columbia University
The fascinating biography of a complex and brilliant man. Lacey's account vividly recreates the postwar Oxford climate in philosophy and jurisprudence, and paints Hart's life inside and outside the university with sensitivity, wit, and authority.' - Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
A major accomplishment of Lacey's effort lies in the way it so effectively recaptures the important themes of Hart's jurisprudence as Hart understood them and as Hart wrote about them...Lacey's book deal admirably with Hart's complex and often distant relationship with Dworkin...one of its great virtues is that it does not limit itself to the Hart that has been framed by the debates of the past thirty years...one of Lacey's primary accomplishments in this book is to offer us a picture of Hart's intellectual life...We therefore owe Lacey a debt of gratitude for bringing back some of the lost Hart...Lacey's accomplishment in helping us recapture a lost Hart stands alongside her skill in presenting the Hart who has transformed what it is to do jurisprudence.' - Frederick Schauer, Harvard Law Review
