No extended biography of G.H. Hardy has appeared in book form. Two of the longer treatments in print are Robert Kanigel’s in his biography of Ramanujan (The Man Who Knew Infinity) and the preface by C.P. Snow to the Cambridge edition of A Mathematician’s Apology first published in 1967. It is not surprising that Snow would find that preface an appropriate place to reminisce about Hardy, since the Apology is the most autobiographical of Hardy’s works. In fact, it is possible to reconstruct many of Hardy’s attitudes on the basis of lines from the book, although some of those lines require some interpretation for today’s readers. This talk aims to understand Hardy’s points against the contemporary discussion of mathematics, pure and applied, and to suggest that Hardy’s arguments had a high water mark of influence that has now somewhat ebbed.