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

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

Chips writes with such vividness that one feels one is living each day in his exalted company . . . An infectious joie de vivre permeates . . . No reader could not be absorbed by his unorthodox depiction of 1940s London and the following decade.

Oldie

Magnificently indiscreet . . . No praise is too high for the diaries' editor Simon Heffer . . . Channon excels in descriptions of great parliamentary events . . and other accounts of important occasions, read in their entirety, are profoundly moving . . . What unending joy Channon will bring to his readers through these irresistible records of upper-class life in a vanished Britain.

Lord Lexden, The House magazine

Scrupulous . . . relieved by flashes of malicious wit.

Literary Review

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

Robert Harris

Chips Channon is irresistibly entertaining company - at any rate in print . . . All in all, a pretty disgraceful life that is a guilty pleasure to read about.

Peter Parker, Spectator

Reading Chips is a mesmerising experience. The diaries give a riveting account of politics and society in Britain from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Snobbish and judgmental, Channon is not a likeable character, but the waspishness is what makes him a great diarist. Heffer is an exemplary editor.

Jane Ridley, Spectator

Channon is honest, frank, intelligent, and wrong about practically everything, but always intensely readable.

Books of the Year, Spectator

Chips is raised from the dead.

Best Biographies of 2022, Daily Telegraph

The MP and socialite 'Chips' Channon was an unlikeable character - bitchy, snobby, prejudiced and caustic. But those vices make him an entertaining diarist. This is the final volume of a triologywhich provides a running commentary on high society and politics from the 1920s onwards, edited with aplomb by Simon Heffer.

Biography and Memoir Book of the Year 2022, The Times

A veritable treasure trove . . . Generations to come will view Heffer's work as an incredible source for studying the interwar, war and postwar years. Yet, the diaries are also a human story, portraying a man's life from early adulthood to premature death. Chips knew everyone, went everywhere and had an opinion on everything.

The Critic Magazine

The great political diaries - think 'Chips' Channon, Tony Benn, Alan Clark, Alastair Campbell or Chris Mullin - offer an insight into politics and a flavour of the writer's personality that no other form can.

Spectator

Heffer has done a great service to political diary writing . . . Herculean work on a political world now long vanished.

Order! Order! Magazine

A masterpiece.

Robert Harris, Books of the Year, Sunday Times

You are wooed into a world of upper-class intrigue and indiscretions, played out in Westminster, Belgravia and snooty country mansions.

Books of the Year, Daily Mail

I have embarked on Simon Heffer's hefty yet meticulously edited three-volume edition of the diaries of 'Chips' Channon . . . and [Chips] does write beguilingly well.

Gyles Brandreth, The Oldie

A scurrilous read. Fascinating. Gripping!

Alan Titchmarsh, Best Books of 2022, Daily Mail

Three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer displaying considerable scholarship . . . Channon, for all his misjudgements, ingratiating behaviour and bigotry, is revealing about public and private life, society and sexuality, and honest about himself to a degree that makes these Diaries a weird kind of masterpiece.

LRB