Harold Acton


Harold Acton

Robert Byron (left) with Harold Acton at Oxford around 1922
Robert Byron (left) with Harold Acton at Oxford around 1922
Born(1904-07-05)5 July 1904
Villa La Pietra, near Florence, Italy
Died27 February 1994(1994-02-27) (aged 89)
Villa La Pietra, Tuscany, Italy
Occupationpoet, historical writer
LanguageEnglish, Italian, French
NationalityBritish
Alma materOxford University
Notable worksThe Last of the Medici (1930, 1932)
Modern Chinese Poetry (with S.-H. Ch'en, 1936)
Peonies and Ponies (1941, 1983)
Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948)
The [Last] Bourbons of Naples (1956, 1961)
Ferdinando Galiani (1960)
Florence (with M. Huerlimann, 1960)
Nancy Mitford (1975)
The Peach Blossom Fan (with S.-H. Ch'en, 1976)
Notable awardsCBE (1965)
knighted (1974)
RelativesJohn Dalberg-Acton

Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton CBE (5 July 1904 – 27 February 1994) was a British writer, scholar, and aesthete who was a prominent member of the Bright Young Things. He wrote fiction, biography, history and autobiography. During his stay in China, he studied the Chinese language, traditional drama, and poetry, some of which he translated.

He was born near Florence, Italy, to a prominent Anglo-Italian family. At Eton College, he was a founding member of the Eton Arts Society before going up to Oxford to read Modern Greats at Christ Church. He co-founded the avant garde magazine The Oxford Broom and mixed with many intellectual and literary figures of the age, including Evelyn Waugh, who based the character of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited partly on him. Between the wars, Acton lived in Paris, London, and Florence, proving most successful as a historian, his magnum opus being a 3-volume study of the Medicis and the Bourbons.

After serving as an RAF liaison officer in the Mediterranean, he returned to Florence, restoring his childhood home, Villa La Pietra, to its earlier glory. Acton was knighted in 1974 and died in Florence, leaving La Pietra to New York University.