Henry Hardy - Career

Career

Hardy was born in London and educated at Lancing College, where his contemporaries included Christopher Hampton and Tim Rice (who made notable appearances as, respectively, Caesar in Shaw’s play Androcles and the Lion and Elvis Presley in a school rag concert). He went on to study classics, then philosophy and psychology, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford, where he met Wolfson’s then President, Isaiah Berlin.

Hardy’s first major editorial work was a collection of writings by Arnold Mallinson, an eccentric Oxford clergyman with whom he lodged for 7 years; he published this work under his own imprint (Robert Dugdale). He also, while still a student, composed a number of musical pieces, which were published many years later as Tunes: Collected Musical Juvenilia (2003).

In addition to publishing under the pseudonym Robert Dugdale (since 1974), Hardy worked for 13 years (1977–90) as an editor at Oxford University Press, first editing and commissioning in the General Books Department, then commissioning as Senior Editor, Political and Social Studies. At OUP in 1980, inspired by Isaiah Berlin’s insistence on the crucial role of individual thinkers in the history of ideas, he founded the Past Masters series (now absorbed into the Very Short Introductions series, which it fathered). His wish to publish a work of popular philosophy, Making Names, by Andrew Malcolm, was not endorsed by OUP; this sparked Malcolm’s landmark legal action against OUP for breach of contract. Hardy’s side of this story is told in his review of Malcolm’s book about the case. Hardy has been a Fellow of Wolfson College since 1990.