For close to 3 months, I've lived in close proximity to 'Chips' Channon, the people and places of his time and social milieu. Indeed, it has been a far-ranging journey that I have enjoyed. This rich and weighty final volume of his Diaries encapsulates the last 15 years of Channon's life through which he --- no longer likely to secure any ministerial preference or power in his capacity as a Conservative Member of Parliament for having been a supporter of Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement --- becomes deeply immersed in describing "events in and around Westminster", in addition to "gossiping about individual MPs' ambitions and indiscretions." He shares with the reader much of what his social life developed into via his relationships with many of the notable figures of the era (e.g. the popularly acclaimed playwright Terance Rattigan with whom he once formed a close, intimate relationship whilst remaining contentedly linked with his beloved "Bunny" --- Peter Coats, a man 13 years his junior whom he had met in the summer of 1939 --- despite the prolonged separation imposed on both of them by the war in which Coats served as an aide to General Archibald "Archie" Wavell who later became the next to last Viceroy of India).

This volume comes in at 1,092 pp., aside from a very comprehensive index, and has several photos of 'Chips' Channon and some of the people with whom he had longstanding relationships. Furthermore, like the previous 2 volumes, this one has ample footnotes which are helpful in further illuminating the events and personalities who fell within Channon's private, social, and political circles. At times, it also reads like a novel, some of whose passages either unsettled me to some extent or made me laugh or smile. Whatever can be said about Channon is that he pulls no punches. His love for his only child Paul is one of the constants in his life.

In one of the numerous reviews I've read about HENRY 'CHIPS' CHANNON: The Diaries 1943-57, Channon is described as "the Samuel Pepys of his time." I would fully concur with that. As a reader, one becomes absorbed in the life of a man who prematurely ages and goes into a slow and steady decline (from the early 1950s) that ends with Channon's death at 61 in October 1958.