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

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 Chips descending into poor health but still 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. 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, as well as a seemingly endless grand parties at which Chips might well rub shoulders with Cecil Beaton, the Mountbattens, or any number of dethroned European monarchs. He has been described as 'The greatest British diarist of the 20th century'. This final volume fully justifies that accolade. Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. Whether describing the antics of London society in the interwar years, or the growing scandal surrounding his close friends Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson during the abdication crisis, or the mood in the House of Commons the day war was declared, his sense of drama and his eye for the telling detail are unmatched. These are diaries that bring a whole epoch vividly to life. A heavily abridged and censored edition of the diaries was published in 1967. Only now, sixty years after Chips's death, can the text be shared in all its unexpurgated and often shocking glory