When the diaries of Harold Nicolson were first published in three volumes in 1966-68, they were widely acclaimed as an incomparable record of their period. Kenneth Clark called them ‘not only a brilliant portrait of English society but a touching self-portrait of a highly intelligent and civilised man’. Malcolm Muggeridge described them as ‘enthralling reading’, while Michael Foot wrote: ‘One stops to marvel at the achievement. Honesty, decency, modesty, magnanimity, are stamped on every page, as evident as the wit.’ Harold Nicolson was at the centre of public events from 1935 to 1945 as a Member of Parliament and a Junior Minister in Churchill’s wartime government. He was the only person to be present at the Versailles Peace Conference, the Nuremberg Trials and the 1946 Paris Peace Conference. But his activities were not confined to politics. He was a well known writer, journalist and broadcaster, and knew many of the most eminent men and women of his day, from Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden to Lord Beaverbrook and Wallis Simpson. His wife was the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, and together they created the famous garden at Sissinghurst. Harold Nicolson took his politics and his writing seriously, and his diary reveals the struggles he had with both. But he was a witty, gregarious and happy man, devoted to his family and many friends, and the diversity of his interests and the charming irony of his style makes his diary a highly entertaining record of his life and times, as well as a document of great historical value. He remains completely unaware that he is tapping out a masterpiece. Brilliant though he is as historian and man of letters, the diary will keep him best remembered. As lively as Creevey or the de Goncourts, Sir Harold is a peer of those classics.A.P. RYAN, 'The Times'