George Weidenfeld and
Nigel Nicolson founded Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1949 with a reception at
Brown's Hotel, London. Among many other significant books, it published
Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita (1959) and Nicolson's
Portrait of a Marriage (1973), a frank biography of his mother
Vita Sackville-West and father
Harold Nicolson. In its early years Weidenfeld also published nonfiction works by
Isaiah Berlin,
Hugh Trevor-Roper, and
Rose Macaulay, and novels by
Mary McCarthy and
Saul Bellow. Later it published titles by world leaders and historians, along with contemporary fiction and glossy illustrated books. Weidenfeld was one of Orion's first acquisitions after the group's founding in 1991, and formed the core of its offerings. At that time Weidenfeld imprints included
Phoenix, its own much earlier establishment; and
J. M. Dent, acquired in 1988 along with its Everyman series. Orion was acquired in turn by
Hachette Livre in 1998. The hardcover rights to
Everyman Library were sold in 1991, and survive as a
Random House property; paperbacks of
Everyman Classics continued under Orion. In January 2002,
Cassell imprints, including the Cassell Reference and Cassell Military were joined with the Weidenfeld imprints to form a new division under the name of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Late in 2013, W&N published the British edition (and Hachette subsidiary
Little, Brown the American edition) of
I Am Malala, the memoir of Pakistani-born teenager
Malala Yousafzai with
Christina Lamb. Yousafzai is a
female education activist, and the
Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2014. ==Book series==