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“... ran equally high. There can’t be many people who were so much involved in bliss. Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, attempting to give some account of what went on between his mother and Violet Trefusis, speaks of the two women being ‘carried on the breezes towards the sun, exalted and ecstatic, breathing the thin air of the empyrean’. One might, more ...”

“... Harold Nicolson was a diarist of genius who would have loved to make a success of public life or literature. He was an able but not outstanding diplomat who retired at 43, a journalist and broadcaster of talent, an MP for ten years and a junior minister in 1940-41. His literary achievements were voluminous, but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase ...”

“... of Challenge in the mid-1920s when she began writing Orlando, described by Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’. Orlando is a love letter to his mother, the eponymous figure who is magically transformed over four centuries from a handsome male aristocrat into a modern woman closely ...”

“... or be funny, Theseus puts up a pretty disappointing display against the American Minotaur. Harold Nicolson had the right idea in steering the budding Berlin towards Moscow – which Berlin finally reached in 1945/6. But whether Sir George Weidenfeld has had the right idea in resurrecting his despatches, I doubt. No person, no issue is concentrated upon in ...”

“... too belligerent, too quarrelsome ... too ambitious, too intolerant, too vindictive’. Harold Nicolson’s brother died ‘a lonely, miserable, embittered failure’; Harold and his wife were ‘marginal people’; Lord Curzon’s political career was ‘an ultimate failure’. These quotations from David Cannadine’s collection of essays, Aspects of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with quite untypical tranquillity and amusement. One wonders how she would have reacted to Nigel Nicolson’s editorial remarks: his generally reverential attitude suddenly dissolves when he is called upon to comment on her views on women, men and war. He is puzzled as to why Virginia Woolf should have taken up the cause of women since, he ...”

“... the Amalienburg near Munich – baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that.Harold​ Nicolson was writing to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, in February 1936 after dining with the Channons: Honor and her husband, Henry, whom everyone knew by his nickname ‘Chips’, but who wasn’t Lord Channon, much as he longed to be. ‘Why am I not very very ...”

“... the same subject to the DNB. The rationale of this remains obscure, and in this volume robs us of Nigel Nicolson on Alexander, A.J.P. Taylor on Beaverbrook, Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Jonathan Dimbleby on his father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael ...”

“... estate had put up for sale to avoid death duties. Lady Sackville, described by her grandson Nigel Nicolson as having ‘made a corner in millionaires and lonely elderly artists’ (among them Kipling, Lord Kitchener, W.W. Astor, Rodin, Lutyens and Henry Ford), was determined to get the painting back. She also hoped that Morgan would buy ...”

“... Like everybody else, I had read a lot about Harold Nicolson and his amazing marriage, but paid little attention to him as the author of many books, including a biography of his father, Lord Carnock, a bestselling life of King George V, a life of Mrs Charles Lindbergh’s father, some novels and some historical studies ...”

“... social status in the world; or provocative and combative and rude like Randolph, Edward Stanley, Nigel Birch and others’) and it seems he is unwilling even to be a gentleman. He notes that Somerset Maugham said that Kipling was ‘not quite a gent’. When Kipling said of somebody, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought: ‘How I wish, in order to ...”