Harold George Nicolson was born on 21 November 1886 in Tehran, where his father, Sir Arthur Nicolson, was a British diplomat; his mother was the former Mary Katherine Rowan-Hamilton. After a conventional upper-class education at Wellington School and Balliol College, Oxford, during which he drew little notice, he entered the diplomatic service in 1909 and began to rise rapidly. In 1913 he married the Hon. Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West, daughter of Lord Sackville, the owner of Knole, perhaps the most magnificent of all the English country houses. Apart from her aristocratic glamour Victoria was not the ideal diplomat's wife, as became evident after a year of embassy life in Constantinople. Far from being complaint to the demands of her husband's peripatetic, formality-laden profession, she was a strong-willed, independent woman who cared little for "society" or urban life. She had independent means and pursued an independent career as a poet and novelist. She also...