Nigel Nicolson has had an unusual life. Born the younger son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, he grew up in a world which combined Bloomsbury with Knole (his grandfather's great house), Eton with Sissinghurst, and Oxford with the uninhabited islands in the Outer Hebrides which he bought while still an undergraduate.He was Virginia Woolf's companion, aged 11, while she was writing Orlando, her fantasy about his mother. He walked alone through the wildest parts of Greece, admired Mussolini whom he saw in Rome, and Goebbels in Berlin, changed his mind when the war came, served in the Grenadier Guards, whose war-history he wrote, in the African and Italian Campaigns.After the war, he joined George Weidenfeld to found the publishing firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Following a shaky start, the business grew into one of the successful post-war publishers, surviving, and ultimately profiting from, such controversies as the threatened prosecution of Lolita.Simultaneously, Nigel Nicolson became a candidate for Parliament, first in Leicester, then in Cornwall, and was elected Tory M.P. for Bournemouth in 1952. He held the seat for seven years, losing it when he was deselected by his constituency Association for supporting the abolition of capital punishment and protesting against the Suez operation of 1956. He describes the crisis, and its dramatic consequences for himself, with much new information taken from his letters and diaries. Read Less