|
| |
Nicolson, Harold (1886-1968) |
|
| |
|
|
| |
British diplomat, politician, journalist, broadcaster and author. His diplomatic career started in 1909 and ended with his resignation 20 years later at the rank of counsellor. Its high points were his membership of the British delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919, and his work as secretary to the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, at the Lausanne conference in 1922-23. After his resignation he devoted himself to writing and politics (from 1935 to 1945 he was National Labour MP for West Leicester). For students of diplomacy, his most important books are the ‘Studies in Modern Diplomacy’ trilogy, which included a biography of his father (who was Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office during the First World War), an examination of the Paris peace conference, and an account of Curzon as foreign secretary. He also published a valuable study of the Congress of Vienna (1815). It was in 1939, ironically enough, that he published the first of his two general works on diplomacy, which was entitled simply Diplomacy (subsequently revised in 1950 and 1963) and had been foreshadowed by the ‘Terminal Essay’ in Curzon: The Last Phase. The second, called The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, appeared in 1954. Much of Nicolson\'s writing on diplomacy turns on the distinction between the old and the new diplomacy. On the former, which he strongly prefers, he is persuasive if hardly original; on the latter, while often acute, his sureness of touch is not so obvious. Nevertheless, he is always a pleasure to read, and his Diaries are justly famous. |
|
| |
|
|
| |
Bookmark this page:
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
<< former term |
|
next term >> |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
