HAROLD NICOLSON : THE WAR YEARS, 1939-1945, VOL. II OF DIARIES AND LETTERS. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. 511 pages. Atheneum. $8.50.
"One should write one's diary for one's great-grandson," writes Sir Harold Nicolson in the diary he kept faithfully for 34 years of his active life as a prolific author and sometime Member of Parliament. "The purely private diary becomes too self-centred and morbid. One should have a remote, but not too remote, audience."
Nicolson, now 80, happily did not wait that long to publish his notes and letters. The first distillation of his life...