The younger son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Nigel Nicolson grew up in a world that combined Bloomsbury with Knole, his grandfather's great house in Kent, Eton with Sissinghurst, Oxford with the uninhabited islands in the Outer Hebrides that he bought while still an undergraduate.

Nicolson was Virginia Woolf's eleven-year-old companion while she was writing Orlando, her fantasy about his mother. He walked alone through the wildest parts of Greece; admired Mussolini, whom he saw in Rome, and Goebbels in Berlin; then changed his mind when war came, serving in the Grenadier Guards in the African and Italian campaigns.

After the war, he founded, together with George Weidenfeld, the publishing firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which, despite a shaky start, survived and eventually flourished in the face of such controversies as the publication of Nabokov's Lolita. At the same time, Nicolson became a member of Parliament, serving as Tory M.P. for Bournemouth for seven years.