Flirting with fascism

If, from Norman Rose's new biography of Harold Nicolson, I had to select a single anecdote that seemed to me to capture its subject in all his contradictions and contrariness, it would be the following.

In 1931, having exchanged a never more than semi-successful diplomatic career for what would ultimately prove to be an ineffectual foray into parliamentary politics, Nicolson signed up for Oswald Mosley's putative fascist party.

One day he and Mosley sat down to discuss what colour the party uniform ought to be, Mosley eventually opting for brown (black had already been taken). And what, for the record, had Nicolson proposed? Why, "grey flannel trousers and shirts".

There you have Nicolson in a nutshell. On the one hand, he "flirted" (to use the canonic euphemism) with several pretty hairy ideas and ideologies, even though, to be fair, he was no fascist and, as a pre-war MP, no appeaser.

On the other, he was what used to be described as an affable cove, urbane and puckish, charming, gregarious and witty (attempting to wade through the linguistic thickets of Finnegans Wake, he commented that "it's worse than a letter from Sybil Colefax", to whom both Churchill and Ernest Bevin were equally partial.

On the one hand, he wrote a ragbag of 30-odd books, many of them not much better than hack work. On the other, his Some People, an anthology of fictionalised portraits of his more eccentric acquaintances, is a genuine masterpiece: small but perfectly formed, and admired by the notoriously hard-to-please Vladimir Nabokov.

He was also, alas, an unrepentant snob, racist and anti-Semite, and the fact that these prejudices were the ideological currency of his uppercrust "set" make them no less repellent to read about today, causing even his biographer to despair of him at times.

His son, Nigel, related how once, when served by a black waiter at the Travellers' Club, he "ostentatiously took out a silk handkerchief to wipe the spot on his plate where the man's thumb had momentarily rested". (Did he really have to do it ostentatiously?) On another occasion, he "quipped" that the appearance and behaviour of a Jewish Lord Mayor of London aroused "my sympathy for Eichmann".

Yet the contradictions just keep coming. For, racist as he was, he loathed South African apartheid and, anti-Semite as he was, he was passionately pro-Zionist. And even within these contradictions lurk other contradictions. He was fond of making the dizzyingly logic-defying statement that he detested the black races but detested apartheid even more.

As for his Zionism, it could, paradoxically, be construed as a sophistical species of anti-Semitism. If, he appeared to imply, the Jewish peoples were granted their own homeland, there mightn't be so deuced many of them elsewhere.

The supreme contradiction of his life was, of course, his marriage to his alter ego (or alter egoist), Vita Sackville-West. Though they had two children, he was primarily homosexual, his lovers including Ivor Novello, Duncan Grant and James Lees-Milne, and so was she, of course, with Virginia Woolf.

Yet they appear to have been a happier couple than many a more conventional one, suggesting that it might make better sense if we married the people we liked rather than those we loved.

A great deal has already been written about that union, most notably by Nigel in his best-selling Portrait of a

Marriage and by Victoria Glendinning in her life of Vita. Norman Rose, unfortunately, has not brought much that's new to his biography, which means that, though lucid and stylish, save for the odd dangling participle, and thankfully not at all longwinded - Harold is already five years old by page three, down from

Oxford by page 24 and wedded to Vita by page 37! - it cannot help striking any reader familiar with the material as a trifle redundant.

The Nicolsons are undoubtedly interesting as raffish products of their period and class, but, once you've read two books about them, you've read them all.