Harold Nicolson was one of the major biographers of the modern period and a leading theorist of the biographical art as well. By training he was a diplomat, and he became, because of his intellectual and temperamental gifts, an unequaled communicator. Born in the Victorian period, Nicolson was a perceptive interpreter of the unfamiliar and hostile twentieth-century world for his English readers.

Harold George Nicolson was born in Tehran, Iran (then Persia). His father, Arthur Nicolson, who was Scottish by birth and became eleventh Baron and first Lord Carnock, was then chargé d'affaires at the British embassy. His mother, Catherine Rowan Hamilton, was of Anglo-Irish descent; in the eighteenth century her great-grandfather, Hamilton Rowan, rebelled against English rule in Ireland and eventually settled in America before being pardoned and returning to Ireland. Nicolson's early childhood was spent wherever his father was posted--Budapest, Constantinople, and Morocco. In 1895, when...