Portrait of a marriage

Nigel Nicolson was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and served in the Grenadier Guards in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War. With Sir George Weidenfeld he founded the publishing firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd. He entered Parliament as the Conservative MP for Bournemouth East in 1952, but lost his seat seven years later. While this mas mostly because he publicly opposed the Suez operation by abstaining from a vote of confidence in the government, the controversy s...

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems. She helped create her own gardens in Sissinghurst, Kent, which provide the backdrop to Sissinghurst Castle. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affairs with women, suc...