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Audiobooks by Chips Channon
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3): 1943-57
Brought to you by Penguin.
This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with a prematurely aged Chips descending into poor health but still socially active and able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles.
Throughout these final fourteen years Chips assiduously describes events in and around Westminster, gossiping about individual MPs' ambitions and indiscretions, but also rising powerfully to the occasion to capture the mood of the House on VE Day or the ceremony of George VI's funeral. His energies, though, are increasingly absorbed by a private life that at times reaches Byzantine levels of complexity. Separated and then divorced from his wife Honor, he conducts passionate relationships with a young officer on Wavell's staff and with the playwright Terence Rattigan, while being serially unfaithful to both. The one constant in his life is his son, Paul, whom he adores.
Through Chips's friendship with Rattigan we encounter the London of the theatre and the cinema, peopled by such figures as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. At the same time we continue to experience vicariously a seemingly endless social round of grand parties and receptions at which Chips might well rub shoulders with Lady Diana Cooper, or Cecil Beaton, or the Mountbattens, or any number of dethroned European monarchs. Those unfortunate enough to die while the pen is in Chips's hand are frequently captured in less than flattering epigrammatic obituaries. The Archbishop of Canterbury was a 'fat fool of 63'. Lloyd George was a 'wicked unscrupulous rogue of charm'. George Bernard Shaw 'died as he lived - very selfishly'. But Chips's gift for friendship and his frequent kindness shine through, too.
He has been described as 'The greatest British diarist of the 20th century'. This final volume fully justifies that accolade.
© Chips Channon 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Chips Channon (Author), Tom Ward (Narrator)
Audiobook
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 2): 1938-43
Brought to you by Penguin.
The second volume of the remarkable, Sunday Times bestselling diaries of Chips Channon.
This second volume of the bestselling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the Prime Minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: 'The war must be more than half over.'
For much of this period, Channon is genuinely an eye-witness to unfolding events. He reassures Neville Chamberlain as he fights for his political life in May 1940. He chats to Winston Churchill while the two men inspect the bombed-out chamber of the House of Commons a few months later. From his desk at the Foreign Office he charts the progress of the war. But with the departure of his boss 'Rab' Butler to the Ministry of Education, and Channon's subsequent exclusion from the corridors of power, his life changes - and with it the preoccupations and tone of the diaries. The conduct of the war remains a constant theme, but more personal preoccupations come increasingly to the fore. As he throws himself back into the pleasures of society, he records his encounters with the likes of Noël Coward, Prince Philip, General de Gaulle and Oscar Wilde's erstwhile lover Lord Alfred Douglas. He describes dinners with members of European royal dynasties, and recounts gossip and scandal about the great, the good and the less good. And he charts the implosion of his marriage and his burgeoning, passionate friendship with a young officer on Wavell's staff.
These are diaries that bring a whole epoch vividly to life.
© Chips Channon 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Chips Channon (Author), Tom Ward (Narrator)
Audiobook
The Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38
Brought to you by Penguin.
Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. Whether describing the antics of London society in the interwar years, or the growing scandal surrounding his close friends Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson during the abdication crisis, or the mood in the House of Commons in the lead up to the Munich crisis, his sense of drama and his eye for the telling detail are unmatched. These are diaries that bring a whole epoch vividly to life.
A heavily abridged and censored edition of the diaries was published in 1967. Only now, sixty years after Chips's death, can the text be shared in all its glory.
© Chips Channon 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Chips Channon (Author), Tom Ward (Narrator)
Audiobook
