Long Life: Memoirs

The son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson tells his own story of soldiering, publishing, politics and authorship. Nigel Nicolson grew up in the world of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsberries, one of three sons of the unconventional parents, MP Harold Nicolson and his bisexual wife, the author Vita Sackville-West. In these memoirs he offers a fresh perspective on their marriage as seen from the viewpoint of one of their children, tells how his twenties were, like others of his generation, subsumed by the second world war (he served in the Grenadier Guards in North Africa), and covers his later life as an MP and full-time writer and publisher with great insight and style.