The Harold Nicolson Diaries

"Certainly towards the end of his life, Harold Nicolson was a crabby old thing. But he wrote his diaries at a particularly interesting time, just before and during the [Second World] War. He starts off as a journalist, but you soon realise how small society was then. In one of his first diary entries he is walking up Whitehall and bumps into the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who invites him into parliament for a drink. He’s very good at describing parliament during the war, and the fear at the time – because they didn’t know who was going to win. He writes about Churchill, whom many people thought was doing things wrong, and the furious debates unconnected with the war, such as about education. He didn’t have to believe that the government was doing the right thing either. It was a proper democracy. Yes, and also artists. He met Dali, James Joyce, had lunch with TS Eliot and so on. He is a jolly good describer of how people spoke, looked and what it was like to be in the room with them. In some ways he was the perfect diarist. He may come across as a social climber, which is because he was, otherwise he couldn’t have written this all. This is interesting, because from other people’s accounts he was picking up women just about every day. And of course Vita was having affairs too. But not a hint of it comes into the diaries. He portrays himself rather as he looks, which is a moustachioed, pipe-smoking old buffer. He’s not lying, but he neglects to mention things. It’s not the whole truth. Then again, he was writing a chronicle of his times, not of himself."