Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3): 1943-57

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with a prematurely aged Chips descending into poor health but still socially active and able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles.

Throughout these final fourteen years Chips assiduously describes events in and around Westminster, gossiping about individual MPs' ambitions and indiscretions, but also rising powerfully to the occasion to capture the mood of the House on VE Day or the ceremony of George VI's funeral. His energies, though, are increasingly absorbed by a private life that at times reaches Byzantine levels of complexity. Separated and then divorced from his wife Honor, he conducts passionate relationships with a young officer on Wavell's staff and with the playwright Terence Rattigan, while being serially unfaithful to both. The one constant in his life is his son, Paul, whom he adores.

Through Chips's friendship with Rattigan we encounter the London of the theatre and the cinema, peopled by such figures as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. At the same time we continue to experience vicariously a seemingly endless social round of grand parties and receptions at which Chips might well rub shoulders with Lady Diana Cooper, or Cecil Beaton, or the Mountbattens, or any number of dethroned European monarchs. Those unfortunate enough to die while the pen is in Chips's hand are frequently captured in less than flattering epigrammatic obituaries. The Archbishop of Canterbury was a 'fat fool of 63'. Lloyd George was a 'wicked unscrupulous rogue of charm'. George Bernard Shaw 'died as he lived - very selfishly'. But Chips's gift for friendship and his frequent kindness shine through, too.

He has been described as 'The greatest British diarist of the 20th century'. This final volume fully justifies that accolade.

© Chips Channon 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • An utterly addictive glimpse of London high society and politics in the 40s and 50s, superlatively edited by Simon Heffer.

    Robert Harris

  • An instant classic. The thing that makes the diary so compelling is [Channon’s] ability to characterise the privileged elite of London Society. The diary is his masterpiece, written with freshness and verve . . . In spite of Chips’s prejudices and snobbishness, his diaries are quite simply the greatest social and political diaries of the 20th century. The three published volumes, each one 1,000-plus pages long, record a vanished world of privilege, promiscuity and inequality – a vast cast of characters, aristocrats, royalties and American socialites. Simon Heffer has done a marvellous job of editing the manuscript. He identifies everything the reader needs to know, but his notes never get between the reader and the text.

    Daily Telegraph

  • Another 1,000-plus pages of Chips Channon’s unexpurgated diaries – with barely a dull passage among them, Simon Heffer’s editing has been as adroit as the task is monumental, and his stamina as bottomless as his subject’s . . . It is never less than diverting.

    New Statesman

  • Nothing compares with the unexpurgated Channon diaries. They are rich, exuberant, copious and shatteringly honest. For those interested in the parliamentary politics of 20th-century England, in the conniving and jostling among European traders of influence, in the swansong of aristocratic glamour in Mayfair and Belgravia, in the capering duplicity necessitated by a criminalised sexuality, the diaries are matchless . . . His editor Simon Heffer, who has been deftly aided by Hugo Vickers, deserves a lifetime award for his strenuous efforts in mastering 3,000 pages of text with such precision and nimble wit.

    The Spectator

  • [The diaries] have disappointed no one in search of gossip, breathtaking snobbery and prejudice, as well as being a window on the political scene . . . It’s the parliamentary picture that is of chief value. Channon was a political lightweight, but his diaries will be a historians’ resource for centuries.

    Country Life

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