It's funny and strange but these kind of personal-as-political theories have a strange currency among those who are simultaneously so powerful and so ill-prepar

It's funny and strange but these kind of personal-as-political theories have a strange currency among those who are simultaneously so powerful and so ill-prepared. Later still, this self-analysis by the man whose friends called him “wicked boy” leads Channon to the most extraordinary political theory. He is analysing the division in London between pro-democracy politicians and the pro-Nazis. And on 29 May 1936 he decides he finally understands what is going on: “It is curious the division of racial mentality, and it reduces itself to a question of sex; all people, whether male or female, who are attracted by men and force are pro-German. The ‘softies’ like Hubert Duggan, who make a cult of female-worship, are pro-French. Duff Cooper, who adores women to an almost insane pitch, and is always trying to rape them in taxis etc, is immeasurably pro-French. Sometimes I wonder whether he is not also a bit pro-war?” Nobody who was worried about their future reputation would leave a pair of sentences like that lying around. We don’t read diarists because we admire them, but because they were there, and they note down what they saw and heard. “Chips” Channon was wrong about almost everything. But do we read Boswell, Casanova, Pepys, Alan Clark or even Sasha Swire for their judgement? We do not. We read them to be taken aback, and to question ourselves. Exhausting, massive, genuinely shocking, and still revelatory, this new edition of the Channon diaries is a work of irrigation and genuine scholarship. Few people may read them from cover to cover, but the stories they contain will rattle noisily around our culture for decades ahead.