A Long Life

Library Journal

Nicolson, the younger son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West and author of Portrait of a Marriage (LJ 10/15/73), has assembled the many experiences of his life into a fascinating memoir. Instead of a straight chronological work, Nicolson has chosen a thematic approach to his life. The chapters relate a varied life including friendship with Virginia Woolf when he was 11, attending Eton and Oxford, serving in World War II, launching a political career, and cofounding the publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, among other accomplishments. Readers with literary interests will be fascinated by his thoughts on the writing of Portrait of a Marriage, publishing Lolita, and the relationship of his mother to Woolf. Nicolson's narrative flows with a charm that easily draws the reader into his life. A marvelous memoir of a rich, multifaceted life; recommended for all libraries.Ronald Ray Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., KS

Booknews

The autobiography of a British author, traveler, politician, soldier, and publisher. Written in a thematic rather than chronological fashion, each chapter describes a different role Nicolson played in his life. In addition to being a son and father, he was also a young associate of the Bloomsbury group of writers which included Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Includes b&w photos. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

NY Times Book Review

A casual, confiding memoir by an 80-year-old man who is always excellent company and has known the world and everyone in it in his career as soldier, politician, publisher, squire and offspring of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.

Kirkus Reviews

As the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Tory MP, cofounder of the British publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, writer and editor, the author can't fail to pen an amusing though occasionally flat-footed memoir. As in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), Nicolson is best as Proustian observer, recounting with calm acquiescence the misadventures of his mother, the libertine, the influence of his father, the patrician man-of-the-world, and the antics of their Bloomsbury friends: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, et al. Though his tone is blithe and his sense of time past more a laundry list than a cohesive web, Nicolson's insights are sometimes startlingly profound, as when he says of Virginia Woolf's death: "The reason why she killed herself was not that she feared madness or found the stress of war unendurable but that she thought she had lost the gift of writing, and what was the purpose of life if she could not describe it?" His accounts of school days at Eton and Oxford are banal, as are reports of his stint with the Grenadier Guards in the African and Italian campaigns during WW II. His early fascinations with Mussolini and Hitler, and his failed attempt to snipe a German guard solely for the purpose of impressing a female war correspondent, are the only memorable facets of this period, and their sheer mindlessness makes Nicolson seem churlish. His subsequent account of his years as an MP and "the single most important moment" in his life, as an honorable abstainer in Parliament's vote for military intervention in the Suez crisis of 1956, redeems him as a conscientious statesman. More a compiler than a writer, the octogenarianNicolson does manage, nonetheless, to sketch an insider's 20th-century Britain—a quiet treat for hopeless Anglophiles. (31 b&w photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)