Most Popular Books by Nigel Nicolson

Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story of her love affair with Violet Keppel Trefusis in 1920 is one of intrigue and bewilderment. In Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson combines his mother''s vivid memoir of escapade with what he learned from copious family letters and explains the context of this romantic crisis. He also describes how Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson went on to live the rest of their lives in harmonious marriage.

An intimate portrait of one of our greatest and most fascinating writers is presented by Nicolson, the distinguished son of British writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West--one of Woolf''s closest friends and sometime lover.

The younger son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Nigel Nicolson grew up in a world that combined Eton with Sissinghurst, Oxford with uninhabited islands in the Outer Hebrides. In this compelling autobiography, traveler, soldier, politician, publisher and author Nigel Nicolson paints a vivid portrait of a truly fascinating life. of photos.

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.

The classic story of the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and a unique portrait of the Bloomsbury Group. ''Vita and Harold have become part of our literature'' OBSERVER The marriage of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson was one of the most controversial relationships of the 20th century. This selection of letters, many of which have never been published, skilfully woven together by their son, Nigel Nicolson, gives dramatic new insight into their fascinating lives. Set within a framework of their son''s highly personal memories, the story of this most extraordinary of marriages comes full circle - from the announcement of their engagement in 1912, through the storm days of Vita''s well-known affairs with Violet Trefusis and Virginia Woolf, during the years of long separation as Harold''s profession as a diplomat took him abroad, and culminating in the days leading up to Vita''s death in 1962.

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."

Lord Leverhulme became involved with the Western Isles after the First World War when he sought to rescue the islanders on Lewis and Harris and introduce them to a new prosperity as he saw it.

Two Roads to Dodge City offers a vividly fresh look at today''s Americans and their ways, by two gifted observers--father and son. This portrait of the country and its people from coast to coast is revealing, understanding, entertaining, and full of surprises. Nigel, the father, starts in Miami, driving in easy stages with stops in small towns and large cities up the coast to Canada, then down the middle of the country to New Orleans, and up to his rendezvous with Adam. Thanks to his frequent visits to the States and his fame as a writer, he has easy access to the grand houses as well as the modest, to leaders of society, government, business, academia, as well as folks in towns and roadside stops. Son Adam, not yet thirty, but already author of several books--one of which, Frontiers, won the 1986 Somerset Maugham Award--wanders a lower road from Los Angeles through San Francisco, Oregon, Idaho, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Wyoming. A tall, unmistakably upper-class Englishman, he has an uncanny gift for swiftly striking up acquaintance with any kind and age of man or woman. His California, for example, has an astonishing freshness, and his experiences with the young and wild, the comfy and the raunchy, the settled and the nomadic, are a joy to share. The diversity of the Nicholsons'' adventures and views, together with the affection, argument, and mutual stimulus which link them across the ever-narrowing 3,000-mile gap, combine to make this an unusual and exciting book.

As the author of "Evelina" and "Cecilia", both of which created new dimensions for the novel, Fanny Burney is as well remembered for her memoirs of Johnson, her mastectomy and her account of the Battle of Waterloo. This portrait of Burney paints a picture of this forward-looking woman.