Customer Reviews

Beautifully written - By: Robert Ray, 18 Nov 2008
As a great collector of all things Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson & Sissinghurst, I leapt on this book as it appeared. But did I really need it? Surely I have read everything printed about Sissinghurst, Vita & Harold, & visited the garden twice, what could it give me? Well for a start Adam Nicolson writes with more facility, imagination & poetry than either of his famous grand parents. A poetic grace, so beautifully expressed, that Vita would have killed to have had. Yes this is prose & not poetry, but Nicolson, like Virginia Woolf can make prose sound like poetry. In this book Nicolson re-examines Sissinghurst from its historic beginnings, to its "decline" to a tourist attraction. His dealings with the National Trust are fascinating, & believable. I found touching his writing of his father, Nigel, Harold & Vita's second son. Nigel, as a son of a most unconventional marriage, it is no wonder his world was really quite dysfunctional. I rather think the conservative Vita, Harold & Nigel would rather be alarmed at what most of Adam has written. For this reason the book is fascinating.