English diplomat, politician and writer Harold Nicholson was BOTD in 1886. Born in Tehran, Iran, where his father Baron Carnock was posted as a diplomat, he had an itinerant childhood, returning to England for his education. After graduating from Oxford University, he joined the Foreign Office, serving as a diplomatic attaché in Madrid and Constantinople. He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was later promoted to First Secretary, undertaking further diplomatic postings in Tehran and Berlin. He resigned from the Diplomatic Service in 1929 and went into politics, joining the Labour Party and elected to Parliament in 1935. He was one of the few British politicians to alert the country to the threat of fascism, opposing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy with Adolf Hitler. During World War Two, he worked as a censor for the Ministry of Information, losing his seat in the 1945 general election. A prolific writer and journalist, he published a series of literary biographies and wrote a weekly column for The Spectator. He published an admired biography of King George V, earning him a knighthood in 1953. Nicholson married the writer Vita Sackville-West in 1913, with whom he had two sons. They had an open marriage, allowing him to pursue discreet affairs with younger men, notably the writer Raymond Mortimer. Sackville-West’s turbulent relationship with her long-term lover Violet Trefusis created a series of crises in the marriage, culminating in 1921 when the two women eloped to France. Nicholson pursued them to a hotel in Amiens, persuading Vita to give up the affair and return to England. In 1930, Nicholson and Sackville-West bought Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, becoming famous for their gardens. Nicholson’s diaries were published shortly after his death, providing an in-depth record of British political history and his literary acquaintances including Marcel Proust and James Pope-Hennessey. In 1973, his son Nigel published the bestselling memoir Portrait of a Marriage, providing a frank account of his parents’ marriage, bisexuality and affairs. The book was successfully adapted for television in 1990, starring David Haig as Nicholson and Janet McTeer as Sackville-West.