He spent his boyhood in various places throughout Europe and the Near East and followed his father's frequent postings, including in St. Petersburg, Constantinople, Madrid, Sofia, and Tangier.

A diplomatic career was honourable and prestigious in Edwardian Britain, but Sackville-West's parents were aristocrats who wanted their daughter to marry a fellow member of an old noble family and so gave only reluctant approval to the marriage.

As the Foreign Office's most junior employee of this rank, it fell to him on 4 August 1914 to hand Britain's revised declaration of war to Prince Max von Lichnowsky, the German ambassador in London.

[3] In his book entitled Peacemaking 1919, he expressed critical views including racial stereotyping about Hungarians and Turks during the peace treaty in Paris.

They were famously devoted to each other and wrote almost every day when they were separated because of Nicolson's long diplomatic postings abroad or Vita's insatiable wanderlust.

[8] Reza Khan disliked British influence in Iran, and after being crowned Shah, he submitted a "categorical note" that demanded the "removal of Indian savars [mounted guards] from Persia".

[9] The Savars had been used to guard the British Legation in Tehran and various consulates across Persia, and Reza Khan felt having the troops of a foreign power riding through the streets of his capital was an infringement of his sovereignty.

[9] Nicolson writing in the third person stated he had a "Kipling inside him and something of an 'empire builder'" told the Persian officials that the note was "so categorical to be almost offensive" and wanted it withdrawn.

He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for the Combined English Universities in the general election that year and edited the party newspaper, Action.

[12] In September 1938 when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with his and Hitler's signature on their "peace" agreement most of the MPs in the house rose in "tumultuous acclamation", a few like Nicolson remained seated; the Tory MP Walter Liddall hissed at him "Stand up, you brute".

Other MPs to remain seated were Winston Churchill (who initially rose to catch the Speaker's eye to speak), Leo Amery, Vyvyan Adams, Anthony Eden (who walked out "pale with shame and anger").

In October 1938, Nicolson spoke out against the Munich Agreement in the House of Commons: "I know that those of us who believe in the traditions of our policy, who believe that one great function of this country is to maintain moral standards in Europe, not to make friends with people whose conduct is demonstrably evil, but to set up some sort of standard by which smaller powers can test what is good in international conduct and what is not-I know that those who hold such beliefs are accused of possessing the Foreign Office mind.

[15]He became Parliamentary Secretary and official Censor[16] at the Ministry of Information in Churchill's 1940 wartime government of national unity, serving under Cabinet member Duff Cooper for approximately a year until he was asked by Churchill to leave his position in order to make way for Ernest Thurtle MP as the Labour Party demanded more of their MPs in the Government;[17] thereafter he was a well-respected backbencher, especially on foreign policy issues, given his early and prominent diplomatic career.

[19] After losing his seat in the 1945 general election, he joined the Labour Party, much to the dismay of his family, in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a hereditary peerage from Clement Attlee; Nicolson stood in the 1948 Croydon North by-election but lost once again.

In 1960, at the Paris summit, Nicolson wrote about the behaviour of the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev implying that he was "a little mad" and the "exchange of insults is not the best method of conducting relations between sovereign states".

[22] In his diaries, he expressed trepidation over making admission as a civil servant to the Foreign Office less exclusive: "Jews are far more interested in international life than are Englishmen.

A fictional account of British national policy in 1939, it tells how Britain's Secretary of State tries to keep world peace with the Royal Air Force aggressively brandishing rocket aeroplanes and an atomic bomb.

In today's terms, it was a multi-megaton bomb, and the geology of the Persian Gulf played a central role, but on the other hand, the likes of Hitler were not foreseen.

Nicolson was variously an acquaintance, associate, friend or intimate to such political figures as Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, Duff Cooper, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, along with a host of literary and artistic figures, including C. E. M. Joad of the BBC's The Brains Trust.

He was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) in 1953 as a reward for writing the official biography of George V, which had been published the previous year.