Sir Harold George Nicolson (1886-1968) was a British diplomat, historian, biographer, critic and journalist, and diarist of note.

Harold Nicolson was born in Tehran, Persia (now Iran), on November 21, 1886, where his father was British charge d'affaires. His father eventually became the first Lord Carnock, and as a child Harold visited the estates of his uncle in Ireland, Lord Dufferin. Harold was an aristocrat through and through.

His early life was spent in diplomatic posts with his father--the Balkans, the Middle East, Morocco, Madrid, and St. Petersburg (Leningrad). He went into the diplomatic service himself, quite naturally, in 1909, after going to Balliol College, Oxford. On leave from his diplomatic post in Constantinople he married Vita Sackville-West in 1913 in the chapel at Knole, Kent. She was the daughter of Lord Sackville, and in his house at Knole there were 365 rooms: it had been a 16th-century present from Queen Elizabeth I...