Chips, with everything

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson, £35)

Christopher Pincher is Minister of State for Housing

DIARIES ARE CAPTIVATING, they tell us so much about so much. They magic up the mood behind the headlines of the time and the slang, preoccupations and prejudices of the day. Alan Clark’s entries from the 1970s illuminate the era’s industrial strife with acid observations of dirty train compartments and slovenly guards, supply us with every seventies slang word under the sun for urination and coin a sartorial look known as the “demi-Heseltine”. They also depict the diarist’s hopes, fears and private feelings.

Alan Duncan’s debut diaries published earlier this year paint a self-portrait that is funny, fretful, fussy and sometimes fickle in ways that the debonair despatch box image masked from his audience.

They tell us, too, much about the editor, if there