Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was a man of manifold talents: a
diplomat, politician, journalist, broadcaster, historian,
biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, literary critic, essayist
and gardener. Perhaps most celebrated for his Diaries (reissued by
Faber Finds in their original three volumes), they run the risk of
obscuring the excellence of his other books. He wrote over thirty:
Some People, Sir Arthur Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919, Curzon, The
Last Phase, 1919-1925, and The Congress of Vienna are all being
reissued in Faber Finds.
Harold Nicolson was educated at Wellington and at Balliol College,
Oxford. He joined the Foreign Office in 1909, and in 1913 married
the writer Vita Sackville-West. He was a member of the British
delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. He left the
Foreign Office in 1929, and in 1935 he was elected National Labour
Member of Parliament for West Leicester. In 1940 he was appointed a
Junior Minister in Churchill's wartime government.
In his eulogy, John Sparrow, with affectionate aptness, described
Harold Nicolson as 'a nineteenth-century Whig leading an
eighteenth-century existence in the twentieth-century.'
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