Harold Nicolson was born in Tehran in 1884. His father was a diplomat and the young Harold spent much of his childhood in Turkey, Spain and Russia. Educated at Oxford, Harold Nicolson joined the diplomatic service in 1909, attending the Versailles Peace Conference as a junior Foreign Office Official in 1919. Nicolson, now married to Vita Sackville-West, embarked on a literary career during which he was to publish some forty books. He was briefly associated with Oswald Mosley, editing the newspaper of Mosley's New Party in 1931 but stopping his support upon the formation of the British Union of Fascists in 1932. In 1935 Nicolson was elected as National Labour Member of Parliament for West Leicester, sitting in the Commons until his defeat in the 1945 General Election. His books include biographies of Alfred Tennyson (1923) and Lord Byron (1924), Peacemaking 1919 (1933), The Congress of Vienna (1946), and The Age of Reason (1961). Sweet Waters (1921) is one of only two novels he wrote (the other being Public Faces). Harold Nicolson died in 1968.