Nigel Nicolson Biography

British biographer and editor, the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, born in London, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. His first publication was The Grenadier Guards, 1939–1945 (1949), an official history of the regiment with which he served throughout the Second World War. In 1948 he became a director of a publishing house, and was MP for Bournemouth and East Christchurch from 1952 to 1959. His most widely acclaimed works are Alex (1973), the biography of Field Marshall Earl Alexander of Tunis, and Portrait of a Marriage (1973), a sensitive and revealing account of his parents' unusual but fundamentally stable relationship. Among his other publications are the biographical studies Mary Curzon (1977) and Napoleon, 1812 (1985), and the topographical books The Himalayas (1975) and Kent (1988). He was the editor of his father's Diaries and Letters (three volumes, 1966–8) and, with Joanne Trautmann, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (six volumes, 1975–80).