Three volumes., 3244pp., photographs, indexes; edited by Simon Heffer.
'“Chips” Channon, a busy socialite and minor MP, would now be a mere footnote in political history, the fleeting flibbertigibbet of one or two other people’s diaries, if it weren’t for his own diary, the teeming, two-million-word monument to himself that he built up secretly, with occasional gaps, between 1918 and his death forty years later. ... Simon Heffer, says that cuts have been made “solely on the grounds of lack of interest,” and I guess he has included about 60 percent of the original. ... The unfolding of a diary is always an adventure, a novel in which the writer has no prior knowledge of the plot. There is self-revelation both calculated and unconscious. It sounds perverse to say that Channon’s snobberies and prejudices make the diaries, but the unabashed exposure of these failings gives you an oddly impressive picture of a person in the setting of his time—the picture, I mean, is absorbing, whatever the subject’s shortcomings.' Alan Hollinghurst.
