An utterly addictive glimpse of London high society and politics in the 40s and 50s, superlatively edited by Simon Heffer.

An instant classic. The thing that makes the diary so compelling is [Channon’s] ability to characterise the privileged elite of London Society. The diary is his masterpiece, written with freshness and verve . . . In spite of Chips’s prejudices and snobbishness, his diaries are quite simply the greatest social and political diaries of the 20th century. The three published volumes, each one 1,000-plus pages long, record a vanished world of privilege, promiscuity and inequality – a vast cast of characters, aristocrats, royalties and American socialites. Simon Heffer has done a marvellous job of editing the manuscript. He identifies everything the reader needs to know, but his notes never get between the reader and the text.

Another 1,000-plus pages of Chips Channon’s unexpurgated diaries – with barely a dull passage among them, Simon Heffer’s editing has been as adroit as the task is monumental, and his stamina as bottomless as his subject’s . . . It is never less than diverting.

Nothing compares with the unexpurgated Channon diaries. They are rich, exuberant, copious and shatteringly honest. For those interested in the parliamentary politics of 20th-century England, in the conniving and jostling among European traders of influence, in the swansong of aristocratic glamour in Mayfair and Belgravia, in the capering duplicity necessitated by a criminalised sexuality, the diaries are matchless . . . His editor Simon Heffer, who has been deftly aided by Hugo Vickers, deserves a lifetime award for his strenuous efforts in mastering 3,000 pages of text with such precision and nimble wit.

[The diaries] have disappointed no one in search of gossip, breathtaking snobbery and prejudice, as well as being a window on the political scene . . . It’s the parliamentary picture that is of chief value. Channon was a political lightweight, but his diaries will be a historians’ resource for centuries.

Chips writes with such vividness that one feels one is living each day in his exalted company . . . An infectious joie de vivre permeates . . . No reader could not be absorbed by his unorthodox depiction of 1940s London and the following decade.

Magnificently indiscreet . . . No praise is too high for the diaries’ editor Simon Heffer . . . Channon excels in descriptions of great parliamentary events . . and other accounts of important occasions, read in their entirety, are profoundly moving . . . What unending joy Channon will bring to his readers through these irresistible records of upper-class life in a vanished Britain.

Scrupulous . . . relieved by flashes of malicious wit.

Chips Channon is irresistibly entertaining company – at any rate in print . . . All in all, a pretty disgraceful life that is a guilty pleasure to read about.

Reading Chips is a mesmerising experience. The diaries give a riveting account of politics and society in Britain from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Snobbish and judgmental, Channon is not a likeable character, but the waspishness is what makes him a great diarist. Heffer is an exemplary editor.