9780399143632

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

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.

"This is a very English memoir, resolutely modest in tone, casually grand in its dramatis personae, and consistently amusing....'Long Life' drops many celebrated names, yet its author remains endearing nonetheless, mainly because he simply accepts, occasionally with bemusement, his privileged life and heritage....'Long Life' is essentially an account of a happy, Epicurean life, a country-house weekend of a book, filled with witty company, long walks in the country, and sumptuous meals."

Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 03/01/1998

"What results overall is less a narrative than a species of conversation, the musings and reconsiderations of a man of vast and varied experience who is very good company....Nicolson is openly an elitist--though not, as he wants to make clear, a snob. He is, rather, a believer in distinctions. In the political arena, Nicolson is an unswerving, if wistful, democrat; but in the cultural sphere, he rejects the egalitarianism currently popular in some circles....His particular political-cultural mix is, in my view, the one that makes the most sense in our time."

R. W. B. Lewis, New York Times Book Review, 03/15/1998

Long Life: Search Results