Chips Channon’s diaries can read like a drunken round of Consequences

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 Edited by Simon Heffer

Hutchinson, pp.1024, 35

Most of the grander 20th-century diarists had a sniffy air about them, looking down their noses at everyone, particularly each other. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, so snippety in his own diaries, was sniped at in others’. James Lees-Milne thought him ‘a flibbertigibbet’; to Nancy Mitford, he was ‘vain and spiteful and silly’.

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TaggedDiaries, Hitler, Marcel Proust, snobbery, Wallis Simpson

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Chips Channon’s diaries can read like a drunken round of Consequences

Chips Channon was conceited, snobbish, disloyal, voyeuristic and wrongheaded – all qualities most helpful to a great diarist, says Craig Brown

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