The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

This second volume of the bestselling diaries of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the Prime Minister so admired by Chips was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: ‘The war must be more than half over’. For much of this period, Channon is genuinely an eye-witness to unfolding events. He reassures Neville Chamberlain as he fights for his political life in May 1940.