Overview

Full Product Details

9780753801406

Table of Contents

Reviews

As the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Tory MP, cofounder of the British publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, writer and editor, the author can't fail to pen an amusing though occasionally flat-footed memoir. As in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), Nicolson is best as Proustian observer, recounting with calm acquiescence the misadventures of his mother, the libertine, the influence of his father, the patrician man-of-the-world, and the antics of their Bloomsbury friends: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, et al. Though his tone is blithe and his sense of time past more a laundry list than a cohesive web, Nicolson's insights are sometimes startlingly profound, as when he says of Virginia Woolf's death: The reason why she killed herself was not that she feared madness or found the stress of war unendurable but that she thought she had lost the gift of writing, and what was the purpose of life if she could not describe it? His accounts of school days at Eton and Oxford are banal, as are reports of his stint with the Grenadier Guards in the African and Italian campaigns during WW II. His early fascinations with Mussolini and Hitler, and his failed attempt to snipe a German guard solely for the purpose of impressing a female war correspondent, are the only memorable facets of this period, and their sheer mindlessness makes Nicolson seem churlish. His subsequent account of his years as an MP and the single most important moment in his life, as an honorable abstainer in Parliament's vote for military intervention in the Suez crisis of 1956, redeems him as a conscientious statesman. More a compiler than a writer, the octogenarian Nicolson does manage, nonetheless, to sketch an insider's 20th-century Britain - a quiet treat for hopeless Anglophiles. (Kirkus Reviews)

Vita Sackville-West was a cold mother, reserved and undemonstrative. Harold Nicolson was an assiduous, affectionate father. They were both writers and their complementary natures resulted in an incongruously happy marriage, a famous garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, and two talented sons. The youngest, Nigel, inherited some of his parents' attributes: his father's wit and humour, his mother's need for solitude. His marriage failed mainly because of his dislike of 'the wear and tear of proximity', and 'after a time I saw the advantages of a single state and have never been tempted to marry a second time'. Nicolson served in the Grenadier Guards in Africa and Italy, became a successful publisher, then a Conservative MP. His independent ideals led to many battles: he supported the abolition of capital punishment, protested against Suez, and published Lolita in Great Britain. He has edited Virginia Woolf's letters and his father's diaries, and has now written a modest but enthralling memoir. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Nigel Nicolson is the son of the politician, diarist and biographer Harold Nicolson and the poet and writer Vita Sackville-West. The family were close friends with Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Nicolson was the co-founder of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, was a Conservative MP in the 1950s and is the author of fifteen previous books. Previous titles: Harold Nicolson Diaries (Bfmt Nov 05); Virginia Woolf (Lives Series); Kent; Mary Curzon; Long Life: Memoirs; World of Jane Austen; Portrait of a Marriage; Vita and Harold

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available