Sir - Christopher Gray in his appreciation of the Victoria Arms, Walton Street, (Weekend, February 15) raises the memory of Dan Davin (1913-1990) as OUP publisher, without once mentioning Dan Davin as writer.

He was indeed 'a senior figure at Oxford University Press', for the last eight years of his 33-year career as Deputy Secretary to the Delegates', but Dan Davin was also a novelist, short story writer, literary critic, soldier and military historian, and memoirist of distinction who published seven novels, two collections of short stories, a history of the New Zealanders' Second World War campaign on Crete, where Davin sustained severe wounds, a collection of memoir essays (Closing Times, 1975) which, in the resonances of evocation and recollection, far outshine Isaiah Berlin's Personal Impressions. No less remarkable than Dan Davin was his wife Winnie, also a catalytic and alluring presence at the Victoria Arms and, later, the Gardener's: as Davin explained in his chapter on Louis MacNeice in Closing Times, Winnie Davin was perhaps the only person on earth with whom MacNeice felt himself able to talk about poems-in-progress, for she was ever sensitive and receptive to all the remarkable souls who gathered around the Davins in north central Oxford.

Quite how many distinguished books by other hands grew from ideas which were seeded and then cultivated by Dan Davin's is hard to know and some have argued that if a truly great book never quite flowed from his pen, this was as a consequence of how much time and energy he gave helping others; yet Closing Times should absolutely be accessible to new readers, and not just in New Zealand. In fact, OUP, let's have the collected Dan Davin, preferably in time for his centenary in 2013.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Oxford