Harold Nicolson

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Sir Harold Nicolson (November 21 1886 – May 1 1968) was a British diplomat, author and politician. He was born in Teheran, the younger son of a diplomat father Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock. He was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1909 he joined the diplomatic service, in which he held various posts, participating in a junior capacity in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

In 1913, he married the writer Vita Sackville-West, who encouraged his literary ambitions. In 1921, he published a biography of French poet Paul Verlaine, to be followed by studies of other literary figures such as Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne and Sainte-Beuve. In 1933, he wrote an account of the Paris conference entitled Peacemaking, 1919.

Both Nicolson and his wife were bisexual and practiced what today we would call an open marriage. They each had a number of same-sex affairs, and once Harold had to follow Vita to France, where she had 'eloped' with Violet Trefusis, to try to win her back. However, they remained happy together -- in fact, they were famously devoted to each other, writing almost every day when they were separated, for example, because of long diplomatic postings abroad. Eventually, he gave up diplomacy, partly so they could live together in England. They had two sons, Nigel, also a politician and writer, and Ben, an art historian.

In the 1930s, he and his wife acquired and moved to Sissinghurst Castle, where they created the gardens that are now famous and run by the National Trust.

In 1931, Harold Nicolson joined Sir Oswald Mosley and his recently formed New Party. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in the 1931 General Election and edited the party newspaper. Nicolson ceased to support Mosley when Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Nicolson entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party Member of Parliament for Leicester West in the 1935 General Election. He became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Information in Winston Churchill's 1940 war time government of national unity. He lost his seat in the election of 1945. Having joined the Labour Party, he stood in the Croydon North by-election in 1948, but lost once again. He was knighted in 1953, as a reward for writing the official biography of George V.

Harold Nicolson's younger son was the publisher and writer Nigel Nicolson, who published works by and about his parents, including Portrait of a Marriage, their correspondence and Nicolson's diary.

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1 Books
2 Quotation
3 See also
4 Further reading
5 External links

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Books

Paul Verlaine (1921)
Sweet Waters (1921) novel
Tennyson - Aspects of His Life, Character and Poetry (1923)
Byron: The Last Journey (1924)
Swinburne (1926)
Some People (1927)
The Development of English Biography (Hogarth Press, 1927) Hogarth Lectures on Literature No. 4
Portrait of a Diplomatist (1930) on Sir Arthur Nicholson
Swinburne and Baudelaire (1930) Zaharoff Lecture'
People and Things: Wireless Talks (1931)
The Changing World 2 , The New Spirit in Literature (1932)
Peacemaking 1919 (1933)
Public Faces (1933) novel
Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919 – 1925: A Study in Post-War Diplomacy (1934)
Dwight Morrow (1935)
Politics in the Train (1936)
Germany and the Rhineland, a Record of Addresses Delivered at Meetings Held at Chatham House (1936) with Norman Angell and others
Helen's Tower (1937) biography of Lord Dufferin
Small Talk (1937)
The Meaning Of Prestige (1937) Rede Lecture /
Diplomacy: a Basic Guide to the Conduct of Contemporary Foreign Affairs (1939)
Why Britain is at War (1939)
Marginal Comment (1939)
The Desire to Please: A Story of Hamilton Rowan and the United Irishmen (1943)
England, An Anthology (1944) editor
Friday Mornings 1941-1944 (1944)
Another World Than This (1945) anthology, editor with Vita Sackville-West
The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity: 1812-1822 (1946)
The English Sense of Humor: An Essay (1946)
Tennyson's Two Brothers (1947) Leslie Stephen Lecture
Comments 1944-1948 (1948)
Benjamin Constant (1949)
King George V (1952)
The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (1954) Chichele Lectures 1953
Good Behaviour: Being A Study Of Certain Types Of Civility (1955)
The English Sense of Humour and other Essays (1956)
Journey to Java (1957)
Sainte-Beuve (1957)
The Age of Reason (1700-1789) (1960)
The Old Diplomacy and the New (1961) David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies Lecture, March 1961
Kings, Courts and Monarchy (1962)
Diaries and Letters (1968), edited by Nigel Nicolson, published by Collins, London