Sir Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), the influential curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, was an inveterate diarist and correspondent whose intimates included Ruskin, Hardy and T. E. Lawrence. Whitemore has adapted ''The Best of Friends'' from several decades' worth of letters exchanged by Cockerell, George Bernard Shaw and Laurentia McLachlan, the intellectual Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey.
