Word: nicolsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...selection for this volume covers the decade leading up to World War II. It is a strikingly perceptive, intensely personal history of those turbulent years, made all the more so because Nigel Nicolson includes letters exchanged by his father and mother, the novelist and poetess Victoria ("Vita") Sackville-West...
Politics y. Art. Nicolson actually tells little that is new about the historic events. What he does provide is an eyewitness record of the era, as well as the passing of a time when everybody of consequence in England knew everybody else-and an unbelievably clubbable lot they were. Nicolson casually notes, for example, that he popped in on Anthony Eden at the time of the Sudetenland crisis and found Eden in despair but still unable to make up his mind about what he would do. Nicolson was horrified at Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and he gives...
...must be political." Nicolson said no, and won, but recalls that Spender remarked, "I fear I cannot make an amusing speech. I have just been reading a book which says that all geniuses are devoid of humor...
...Nicolson never tried to disguise the fact that he was a member of the elite, and since he obviously felt that people outside that elite had something wrong with them, he frequently sounds like a crashing snob. He never truly cared for Mrs. Wallis Simpson, for example; he looked on her as an American social climber, though he faithfully recorded each of the many times he met her at parties. Like many Englishmen of his generation and class, he was troubled almost as deeply about the abdication as he was about Munich. "What is so tragic," he confided...
Blaze & Blink. Throughout his diaries, Nicolson gives deft descriptions of the people he met. George Bernard Shaw had "eyes as simple and unmalicious as those of an animal. He talks with a faintly effeminate voice and a soft brogue." Henry Ford's eyes "blaze and blink with faith and his large mouth twists sensitively into all variations of approval, obstinacy, pity and contempt...