Product Description

Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon's extraordinary diaries,first published in 1967,are now considered a modern classic.The years covered in this volume,1934-53,recall a vanished world where Channon's priviliged orbit circled every social and public figure of the day in a round of parties,balls,country-house weekends and endless gossip.His position as a MP enabled him to chronicle,famously,the Abdication Crisis,when King Edward VIII's love for 'jolly,plain'unprepossessing' Mrs Simpson reduced him to 'a broken man at bay'. Culled from some three million words in the original,Robert Rhodes James's selection gives us the moments and characters of history,etched indelibly by a master observer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #423733 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Customer Reviews

Chips Channon: the Prince of Diarists.
To my mind, this book establishes Chips Channon as the undisputed Prince of Diarists: as well informed as Pepys, as racy and as effortlessly snobbish as Alan Clark. Robert Rhodes James primly informs us in his introduction that he had been suitably discreet and removed many of the spicier scandals from the diaries but what survives is Channon's wonderfully feline assessment of all the leading personalities of the day and a uniquely honest portrait of a man in the round.

There is really no better account of the Abdication of Edward VIII or the Munich Crisis because Channon sees and presents them from the inside, from the dinner tables of the capital or the Smoking Room of the House of Commons.

As befitted a fabulously wealthy American who aspired to be an English gent, Channon was a fascinated observer of the London social scene and again and again in the diaries he brilliantly renders for us the glamour that surrounds power and the way in which politics operates through a web of gossip, affairs and private vendettas.

Best savoured a few delightful pages at a time, this book is to be thoroughly recommended for its wit, its pen portraits of personalities as various as Chamberlain, Wallace Simpson and Bosie Douglas (aged ex lover of Oscar Wilde) and (for this reviewer)its deep underlying melancholy.

Fascinating and Horrible
Like the Curzon sisters, Chips Channon was both a truly fascinating and truly horrible man. He was unforgiveably rude to servants (always a bad sign). One cannot decide whether he married his Guinness wife because he loved a) her, b) her money, or c) her social connections, but probably a lot more of b and c than a. Whatever kind of bisexual, cad, and/or prototypical social-climber he was, Chips Channon was one of the three unquestionably great diarists of the 20th century (the other two being the unequalled James Lees-Milne and the runner-up Alan Clark). Chips' diaries are acutely perceptive, witty, biting (esp his earlier entries re Winston C), snobbish in excelsis, self-involved to the point of absurdity, and utterly, utterly fascinating. One wonders whether he had a great degree of self-knowledge (unlike Lees-Milne or Clark), though. His commentary on the great people, places, and events he experienced is entrancing, and his descriptions are often sublime. It is said that his son Paul Channon is reluctant to allow an expanded version of Chips' diaries because of the quite well-deserved scandal they would engender. Since Paul's political career is over, he ought to add a few more pounds to his bank balance and put all two million words of his father's diaries into print. They would be a sensation, and a guaranteed huge seller. As it is, even the "edited" bowlderized version we now have is one of the great English diaries of all time - and written by an American! Imagine!

A fascinating insight into pre ww2 upper classes
A very interesting book for anyone interested in or is studying British history or politics. Chips was an M.P and he gives an insight into the world of the upper crust as they partied the nights away in London townhouses and stately piles, in England, when it was a land free of all the modern conveniences.

Diaries like this one, just like Pepys diaries are a timeless record of life in a particular period of our Island's history.