Harold Nicolson was a diarist of genius who would have loved to make a success of public life or literature. He was an able but not outstanding diplomat who retired at 43, a journalist and broadcaster of talent, an MP for ten years and a junior minister in 1940-41. His literary achievements were voluminous, but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is reminded of Balfour's remark about Asquith, whose clarity of speech, he observed, was a positive disadvantage when he had nothing to say. Nicolson's diaries and letters make spendid reading, but he was neither a great littérateur nor a man of action. It was a tragi-comic delusion that, converted from National Labour to 'real' Labour, he supposed himself to be a possible Ambassador in Paris under Attlee's government, and even at times dreamed of being Foreign Secretary.

LRB 18 December 1980 | PDF Download