Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

``For each of us the magnetic north is each other,'' Harold wrote Vita; ``If you were to die, I would kill myself,'' she told him. Married, they lived apart during much of the time spanned by these loving letters (1910-1962), while he pursued a political and writing career and she wrote poetry and novels and circulated in the Bloomsbury literary world. While he lunched with Germany's president, she was blasting T. S. Eliot; he had a dismal visit with James Joyce while she went to H. G. Wells's ``awful'' dinner party. He was present at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and a member of Parliament as Hitler came to power. She ``eloped'' with Violet Trefusis and was obsessed with Virginia Woolf; he had homosexual affairs. Their mutual adoration survived it all. They knew Everybody and, gifted writers both, they described them to each other with grace and feeling. Their son, who has artfully edited their correspondence (most of it previously unpublished), told of their relationship in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), but the sound of their own voices in these enchanting letters gives fresh and privileged insight into exceptional lives and times. (July)