Valentine Lawford

Valentine George Lawford (February 27, 1911 – June 18, 1991) was a British diplomat and long-term partner of German-American fashion photographer Horst P. Horst. He adopted the name Nicholas in Paris in the late 1930s (apparently because Valentine was a girl's name in French)

Early life Valentine Lawford attended Repton School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he read modern and medieval languages. He undertook further linguistic studies at the Sorbonne, Strasbourg and in Vienna.

Career Having passed the Diplomatic Service exam, he joined the Foreign Office in London 1934. He served as Third Secretary at the Paris Embassy from 1937 to 1939. From 1939 to 1946 he was the private secretary of Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin, all three of them Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. In 1968 Vogue's Book of Houses, Gardens, People collected most of those articles, Lawford's contribution defined as "lyrical essays". In 2016 Around That Time: Horst at Home in Vogue, featured much of the material of the original book.

Alone he wrote Bound for Diplomacy, his autobiography published in 1963, and Horst, His Work & His World in 1984.

At the time of his death, Lawford was living in Oyster Bay Cove, New York.