Harold Nicolson

eBook, ePUB

Sir Arthur Nicolson, Bart, First Lord Carnock (eBook, ePUB)

A Study in the Old Diplomacy

Beschreibung

Without exaggeration this can be said to be two books in one: it is both a biography of Harold Nicolson's father and a history of British diplomacy from the late nineteenth-century until the middle of the First World War. Described as 'the quintessential diplomat' Sir Arthur's various postings took in Berlin, Peking, Athens, Teheran, Budapest, Constantinople, Madrid and St Petersburg. During his career his instincts mutated from pro-German and hating France and Russia, into a stage of wanting to make friends with those two countries and hating Germany. Harold Nicolson has an interesting and brave hypothesis regarding the First World War making a distinction between its origin and its causes. Regarding the former, in the words of his biographer James Lees-Milne, 'Harold maintained that from the years 1900 to 1914 we, compared to the Germans, had a clean sheet, whereas regarding the latter, say from the year 1500 to 1900 our sheet was very black indeed. Our Elizabethans behaved worse than the Kaiser's imperialists. And when the Kaiser's imperialists in the last two decades of the nineteenth-century developed predatory instincts in Africa, they met from us ''pained and patronising surprise.'' Harold with justice and a good deal of courage blamed Great Britain for the causes and Germany for the origin of the great conflict.' Harold Nicolson always considered this to be his best book and its universally favourable reception supports that with the Times Literary Supplement observing that as a biography it was composed in the new intimate fashion introduced by Lytton Strachey. As has been said though, it was more than a biography, it was a history, and a most fascinating one, of the period leading up to the Great War.

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Autor

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was a man of manifold talents: a diplomat, politician, journalist, broadcaster, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, literary critic, essayist and gardener. Perhaps most celebrated for his Diaries (reissued by Faber Finds in their original three volumes), they run the risk of obscuring the excellence of his other books. He wrote over thirty: Some People, Sir Arthur Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919, Curzon, The Last Phase, 1919-1925, and The Congress of Vienna are all being reissued in Faber Finds. Harold Nicolson was educated at Wellington and at Balliol College, Oxford. He joined the Foreign Office in 1909, and in 1913 married the writer Vita Sackville-West. He was a member of the British delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. He left the Foreign Office in 1929, and in 1935 he was elected National Labour Member of Parliament for West Leicester. In 1940 he was appointed a Junior Minister in Churchill's wartime government. In his eulogy, John Sparrow, with affectionate aptness, described Harold Nicolson as 'a nineteenth-century Whig leading an eighteenth-century existence in the twentieth-century.'

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Faber & Faber
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. Februar 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780571287499
• Artikelnr.: 38228124