'Precocious and multi-faceted talent' made English writer Beverley Nichols 'a celebrity by the time he was old enough to attend Oxford University. His first novel, Prelude, was written before his eighteenth birthday; his second, Patchwork, was published before he finished his degree. While in school he founded a literary magazine, the Oxford Outlook, and edited it along with an already-established magazine, Isis. He was president of the famous Oxford Union Debating Society and was also known as a gifted pianist. Following school, he quickly established a reputation as a brilliant and daring interviewer and journalist. "Witty, elegant, and ruinously good-looking," according to the London Times, he was an intimate of Noel Coward, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, and Somerset Maugham (qq.v.), among others. His sparkling wit and his connections made him a natural candidate for the job of columnist for the Sunday Chronicle, and for fourteen years he filled page two of that newspaper with "glossy gossip and name-dropping anecdotes".'
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Nichols travelled to Australia in 1924 to ghostwrite Dame Nellie Melba's memoir, Melodies and Memories (1925).
(Sources: Contemporary Authors Online; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
