£20.00£20.00
FREE delivery:
Saturday, Sep 9
in the UK
Payment
Secure transaction
Dispatches from
Amazon
Sold by
Amazon
Returns
Returnable within 30 days of receipt
£5.31
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Sir Arthur Nicolson, Bart, First Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy Paperback – 11 Nov. 2011
Purchase options and add-ons
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.
- Print length472 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFaber and Faber
- Publication date11 Nov. 2011
- Dimensions13.51 x 3 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-100571269028
- ISBN-13978-0571269020
Popular titles by this author
Product description
About the Author
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.'
Product details
- Publisher : Faber and Faber; Main edition (11 Nov. 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 472 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0571269028
- ISBN-13 : 978-0571269020
- Dimensions : 13.51 x 3 x 21.59 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 930,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 132,174 in History (Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews