Daniel’s Reviews > Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38 > Status Update

He [John Buchan] told me that he and Henry James had been made literary executors of a near relation to Mrs Buchan's... I think he said Lady Oxford... or was it Lady Orford? who had all the remaining unpublished Byron letters. After much hesitation they burnt over one hundred letters from Byron in which he confessed and described the most heinous sins known to man.

[7 Sep 1924]

We docked yesterday after a comfortable six days' crossing. I have made great and I hope permanent friends with John Buchan and his wife.

[Of course you have. You can't be in Canada for 20 minutes without somehow becoming best friends with the most interesting and famous people there.]

[21 Aug 1924]
I took Prince Nicholas of Romania to dine at Buck's last evening. He is a comic lad, attractive, a little shy-making as he wore a blue dinner jacket such as the P of W [i.e. Channon's friend the Prince of Wales] always wears. We went to a play and met some actresses including Miss Tallulah Bankhead and only returned home at 6.30.

[Chips meets Rudyard Kipling and his wife, 13 July 1924]
I got them both onto politics and Mrs Kipling, good old Tory, regretted that all the power in England was no longer in the hands of forty families as it had once been. They are both ardent Conservatives and bring to it all the freshness and enthusiasm of radicals.

we played sardines. For an hour Ld Londonderry, Lady Curzon, Biddy Carlisle, Jean Norton, the Aga Khan lay under a very hot bed almost stifling. HM's Minister to Persia, Sir Percy, a pompous silent creature with a pot belly and something rather shy and nice about him was a bit shocked. We then ragged all the bedrooms and dressed the Spanish Ambassadress in the Aga Khan's pyjamas and carried her downstairs protesting.