Best Selling Books by Nigel Nicolson

As the author of "Evelina" and "Cecilia", both of which created new dimensions for the novel, Fanny Burney is as well remembered for her memoirs of Johnson, her mastectomy and her account of the Battle of Waterloo. This portrait of Burney paints a picture of this forward-looking woman.

Lord Leverhulme became involved with the Western Isles after the First World War when he sought to rescue the islanders on Lewis and Harris and introduce them to a new prosperity as he saw it.

The son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson tells his own story of soldiering, publishing, politics and authorship. Nigel Nicolson grew up in the world of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsberries, one of three sons of the unconventional parents, MP Harold Nicolson and his bisexual wife, the author Vita Sackville-West. In these memoirs he offers a fresh perspective on their marriage as seen from the viewpoint of one of their children, tells how his twenties were, like others of his generation, subsumed by the second world war (he served in the Grenadier Guards in North Africa), and covers his later life as an MP and full-time writer and publisher with great insight and style.

Nigel Nicolson est le fils de Vita Sackville-West et de Harold Nicolson. Elle était la célèbre romancière et lui l’homme politique de renom. Ils eurent un mariage heureux et l''affection qu’ils se portaient n''a cessé de croître en profondeur en dépit des complications résultant de leur singularité : « Tous deux aimèrent des gens de leur propre sexe. » Leur union connut des tumultes causés par leurs infidélités respectives – la passion amoureuse de Vita pour Violet Trefusis notamment –, mais leur mariage demeura l''axe inébranlable de leur vie. Écrivain, éditeur de la correspondance de Virginia Woolf, Nigel Nicolson a publié en 1973 ce qui se donne à la fois comme le journal intime de sa mère, un récit d’une incroyable modernité – « un jour viendra où la société acceptera que les femmes puissent aimer les femmes et les hommes, les hommes » (Vita Sackville-West en 1920) – et un panégyrique du mariage. Traduit de l’anglais par Viviane Forrester.