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 surrounding his publishing firm's decision to publish Nabakov's *Lolita* in 1959 did not help. He became Chairmen of the British United Nations Association in 1961. He wrote several books on politics, architecture, and social history, and was the editor of his father's diaries.