Few popular writers of the twentieth century have had such a long, varied, and successful career as Beverley Nichols. Of his nearly seventy books, twelve are novels; the rest include a collection of short stories; plays; an autobiography; travel books; polemical essays; books about gardening, flowers, flower arranging, and cats; and children's stories. Although most of his work went out of print long before his death at eighty-five, several titles have become classics of their kind and are collected by bibliophiles, at least in Britain. While fiction forms a relatively small proportion of a large output, his success in his other work resulted in large part from his use of narrative techniques in nonfictional genres.

John Beverley Nichols was born on 9 September 1898 at Long Ashton, near Bristol in Somerset, the youngest of the three sons of John Nichols, a successful solicitor, and Pauline Zoe Lilian Shalders Nichols. He...