page_title: Harold Nicolson
section_title: Writer
hierarchical_section_title: Harold Nicolson / Writer
caption_attribution_description: English: A brown "Blue plaque" to Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson on their house at Mozart Terrace, Ebury Street, London SW1, England. Photographed by me 29 September 2006. Oosoom
context_page_description: Sir Harold George Nicolson, KCVO CMG, was a British politician, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster and gardener. He was the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West.
context_section_description: Encouraged in his literary ambitions by his wife Vita Sackville-West, also a writer, Nicolson published a biography of French poet Paul Verlaine in 1921, 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 Peace Conference entitled Peacemaking 1919.
  Nicolson noted that "although I loathe antisemitism I do dislike Jews". In his diaries he expressed trepidation over making admission as a civil servant to the Foreign Office less exclusive, writing that: "Jews are far more interested in international life than are Englishmen. And if we opened the service it might be flooded with clever Jews." Tony Kushner has argued that he typified the antisemite who 'warned publicly against the dangers of antisemitism at any level, yet privately hated the very presence of Jews'. Without evidence, he assumed in his diaries in 1944 that a group of girls relaxing with American GIs were Jewish: "I am all for a little promiscuity. But nymphomania among East End Jewesses and for such large sums of money makes me sick."
  Nicolson is also remembered for his 1932 novel Public Faces, which foreshadowed the nuclear bomb. A fictional account of British national policy in 1939, it tells how Britain's secretary of state tries to keep world peace with the Royal Air Force aggressively brandishing rocket airplanes and an atomic bomb. In today's terms, it was a multi-megaton bomb, and the geology of the Persian Gulf played a central role, but on the other hand the likes of Hitler was not foreseen.
  After Nicolson's last attempt to enter Parliament failed, he continued with an extensive social schedule and his programme of writing, which included books, book reviews, and a weekly column for The Spectator.
  His diary is one of the pre-eminent British diaries of the 20th century and a noteworthy source on British political history from 1930 through the 1950s, particularly in regard to the run-up to World War II and the war itself: Nicolson served in high enough echelons to write of the workings of the circles of power and the day-to-day unfolding of great events. His fellow parliamentarian Robert Bernays characterized Nicolson as being "...a national figure of the second degree". Nicolson was variously an acquaintance, associate, friend, or intimate to such figures as Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, Duff Cooper, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, along with a host of literary and artistic figures including C.E.M. Joad of the BBC's Brains Trust.
caption: Commemorative plaque in Ebury Street, London
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