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“... I never thought I would find myself writing warmly about a book by a Scottish laird. Adam Nicolson owns the Shiant Islands, east of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The Shiants are a compact cluster and, like all small islands, offer the marvellous sense that you can encompass them, you can easily walk or sail round them and get to know each rock-face or sand-bar, each vein of water or peat-hagg lip ...”

“... she makes no particular case for Carrie, Flanders gives a more sympathetic account of her than Adam Nicolson manages in his ‘short life’. Revisionist biographies can be brief if they are meant to debunk. One well-aimed brick will shatter a plate-glass front. To make a subject more sympathetic, however, means re-creating nuances of character and ...”

“... we are given bits of John McGahern and John Nash, Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd and Edward Thomas and Adam Nicolson, and the place itself is disappeared: ‘To my mind the Pools [of Dee] possess a near supernatural presence, recalling the dust-free mirrors of Buddhist symbolism or the “well at the world’s end” in Neil Gunn’s novel of the same ...”

“... of the KJB takes surprisingly bitter sideswipes at a rather good recent history of 1611 by Adam Nicolson. Sugirtharajah chronicles how successful a handmaid of empire the KJB proved; its unprecedentedly numerous usages of the word ‘nation’ as a translation for four different Hebrew words in the Old Testament helped to colour a new vision of ...”

“... austerity, industriousness, respect, stoicism, fortitude, fairness, regularity, decency,’ Adam Nicolson wrote a month later in the Telegraph, ‘there is nothing particularly British about them. They are the virtues of a Victorian middle class.’ If these bourgeois values attach to a class and a period, did they also belong to other classes? We ...”

“... Moreover, he combined this mere knowledge with social qualifications of a high order. Harold Nicolson admires the way ‘he wheedles things out of old ladies.’ There is more to it than that. He has just the right tone when he makes sympathetic noises to those who deplore the moral decadence of the English people, and enough decadence of his own to ...”

“... verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan’. The Nicolsons were hardly impoverished – they’d moved ...”