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Henry Chips Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 review â priceless interwar gossip
Chips and Lady Honor Guinness at their wedding in July 1933. Photograph: Trustees of the literary estate of Henry âChipsâ Channon
Chips and Lady Honor Guinness at their wedding in July 1933. Photograph: Trustees of the literary estate of Henry âChipsâ Channon
Editor Simon Heffer brings us the first, sensationally unexpurgated volume of the musings of the Chicago-born socialite and social climber
Sun 4 Apr 2021 06.00 EDT
The great diarists get away with it. No matter how foolish or spiteful or pompous they appear in print, they transcend faults of character by the simple virtue of brilliant writing. Only itâs not that simple â if it were, everyone would do it. In the first half of the 20th century, no diarist in English would achieve greater notoriety than Henry Channon, AKA âChipsâ, his name practically a byword for gossipy flamboyance and indiscretion. When
Henry âChipsâ Channon review â the celebrated diaries, unredacted
Sex, scandal, kinks and queens ⦠edited by Simon Heffer, these interwar diaries by the Tory MP are a masterpiece of storytelling and character assassination
Wallis Simpson . âA good kindly woman who has had an excellent influence on the young monarch.â Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
Wallis Simpson . âA good kindly woman who has had an excellent influence on the young monarch.â Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
Sat 13 Mar 2021 02.30 EST
âWhat is more dull than a discreet diary? One might as well have a dull soul,â wrote Henry âChipsâ Channon in his journal for 25 July 1935. The question was rhetorical at this point, but itâs clear that he already had his future readers in mind. Channon knew he was as good as Pepys, and he had an inkling that it was his diary â rather than his not-very-good novels and his not-very-stellar Westm
There has never been another American interloper quite like Sir Henry Chips Channon, who married a Guinness heiress and became both an MP and the darling of London society.
But perhaps even Channon would have been astonished that his Diaries now published in unexpurgated form for the first time would inspire frenzied debate more than eight decades after he wrote them.
One entry for November 19, 1936 is generating particular excitement. This now records not just that tiaras nodded [and] diamonds sparkled at the dinner party Channon and his wife held for Edward VIII at their house in London s Belgravia, but also the King s startlingly modern turn of phrase when, after dinner, he announced that he needed to relieve himself.
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N AUGUST 1936 Henry “Chips” Channon and his wife, Lady Honor Guinness, went on an official visit to the Berlin Olympic games along with a bunch of other British grandees. They had a simply wonderful time. They didn’t pull off the ultimate social coup of having dinner with Hitler the closest they got to the Führer was when he visited the Olympic stadium and “one felt as if one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature”. But the rest of the Nazi elite went out of their way to entertain the visiting Britons.
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