Diaries and Letters 1930-1939

London England: Collins, 1967. Hardback. Slight foxing to end inside covers and edge. Harold Nicolson kept a diary from the moment he resigned from the Foregin Office at the end of 1929 until October 1964. This volume covers the period from the beginning of the diary until the outbreak of war. it is an incomparable record of those years, composed by a man who knew almost every major figure of his times and was endowed with the ability to describe what he heard, saw and did, and to communitate what he felt. Married to the poet and novelist V. Sackville-West, he lived in many words and enjoyed them all. He was gay, immensely socialble and profoundly interested in the way and politics of the world. This book is of historical importance for the picture it gives of historical importance for the picture it gives of literary, political and social London in the 1930s. But it is also the portrait of a marriage between two very different and remarkable people. Harold Nicolson and V. Sackville-West, as their son points out in his Introduction, were on the face of it wholly unsuited to each other. While he was sociable, she was anti-social; while he was ambitious, urbane and gay, she was 'romantic, secret and undomesticated' Yet no one reading this volume, and the letters which they exchanged daily when they were apart, can doubt the depth of their relationship. The symbol of that harmony can be found in the famous gardens at Sissinghurst which they created in close collaboration during the 1930s, and which rightly has an important place in these pages. The book has been edited by Harold Nicolson's second son, Nigen Nicolosn whose Introduction illuminates the background to his parents lives. Illustrated. 448 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions ,and all types of Academic Literature.) . 4th Impression. Cloth. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Hardback.