Long Life

The younger son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Nigel Nicolson grew up in a world that combined Bloomsbury with Knole, Eton with Sissinghurst, Oxford with uninhabited islands in the Outer Hebrides. He was Virginia Woolf's eleven-year-old companion while she was writing Orlando, her fantasy about his mother. He admired Mussolini in Rome and Goebbels in Berlin, then changed his mind when war came, serving in the Grenadier Guards in the African and Italian campaigns. After the war, he founded, with George Weidenfeld, the publishing firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which flourished in the face of such controversial publications as Nabokov's Lolita. Simultaneously, he became a member of Parliament, serving for seven years as Tory MP for Bournemouth. After leaving politics, he returned to writing full-time, editing his father's famous diaries and Virginia Woolf's letters. His best-known book, Portrait of a Marriage, describes his mother's torrid love affair with Violet Trefusis and its aftermath. In Long Life, Nigel Nicolson paints a vivid portrait of a truly fascinating life.