New Releases by Nigel NICOLSON

Leven en huwelijk van de Engelse schrijfster Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) en haar echtgenoot Harold Nicolson (1886-1968), diplomaat en schrijver, weergegeven door hun zoon. Gebaseerd op herinneringen, dagboeken en een autobiografie van zijn moeder.

Opening soon after Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West and culminating with the publication of Orlando, this volume of letters covers Bloomsbury''s most triumphant period. This was the time when Woolf wrote five of her best-known books, including Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and whilst she became one of the most famous writers of her generation, many of her friends - Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster - had become equally eminent. The slow evolution of Virginia''s affair with Vita is traced through some of her wittiest letters, while her correspondence with her sister Vanessa and other friends reveals a strong sympathy with people beneath her ironic view of life.

In 1870, a year before the great fire which destroyed the city, a girl called Mary Leiter was born in the suburbs of Chicago, the daughter of a self-made man. Although she died at the age of only thirty-six, she became the most famous American woman of her time. As the wife of Lord Curzon, and Vicereine of India when British power was greatest, she occupied the most splendid position which any American, man or woman, has ever held in the British Empire, and fulfilled the role with incomparable grace, courage and distinction. Mary Leiter started life with many advantages: a wealthy and loving father, great beauty, and a charm and intelligence which soon won for her many friends, like President Grover Cleveland and Henry Adams, far beyond the reach of most women of her class. She was the star of Washington and New York society before she was twenty, and then went to Paris and London, which she conquered too. She met and married, after a secret engagement lasting two years, George Nathaniel Curzon, and becme his Vicereine at the age of twenty-eight. For six years she and her husband presided over a Viceregal court of unequaled magnificence, and on her two return visits to England she became an intimate of leading members of the British Cabinet, as she had of Lord Kitchener in India. A few months after Curzon resigned under tragic circumstances, she died. "It is a Cinderella story," Nigel Nicolson says, "if you can accept that Cinderella''s father was worth at least $20 million." It is also the portrait of three different societies -- American, English and Indian -- at the turn of the century. But the main theme of this book is emotional and personal -- the deepening relationships between a lovely American girl and an English statesman of extraordinary intellect and powers. "It is impossible to judge this difficult, complex man," Mr. Nicolson writes, "if one ignores his capacity of joy and love, which Mary, more than any other woman in his life, awoke in him."

Houses typify all the main architectural styles from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century, and have been selected for both historical association and architectural merit.