Channon moved to England in 1920 and became strongly anti-American, feeling that American cultural and economic views threatened traditional European and British civilisation.
[3] His grandfather had immigrated to the US in the mid-nineteenth century and established a profitable fleet of vessels on the Great Lakes, which formed the basis of the family's wealth.
[3] Channon associated with the artistic elite of Paris, having dinners with the writer Marcel Proust and poet Jean Cocteau.
[9] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) said of this phase of Channon's life, "adoring London society, privilege, rank, and wealth, he became an energetic, implacable, but endearing social climber.
"[10] His anti-Americanism was reflected in his novel, Joan Kennedy (1929), described by the publishers as "the story of an English girl's marriage to a wealthy American and of her attempts to bridge the gulf created by differences of race and education.
[10] He wrote two more books: a second novel, Paradise City (1931) about the disastrous effects of American capitalism,[3] and a non-fiction work, The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933).
The latter, a study of the last generations of the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavarian kings, received excellent notices, and was in print twenty years later.
Some critical reservations reflected Channon's adulation of minor European royalty: The Manchester Guardian said of his account of the 1918 revolution, "he seems to have depended almost exclusively on aristocratic sources, which are most clearly insufficient.
[3] Channon quickly established himself as a society host, in his blue and silver dining room designed by Stéphane Boudin and modelled on the Amalienburg in Munich.
[16] Perhaps the apogee of his career in that role came on 19 November 1936, with a guest list headed by King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, of whom Channon was a friend and admirer, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, then Regent and his wife Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark, the Duke of Kent and his wife Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark .
In the words of the ODNB: "Always ferociously anti-communist, he was an early dupe of the Nazis because his attractive German princelings hoped that Hitler might be preparing for a Hohenzollern restoration."
[19] Speaking of the Nazi concept of the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), Channon noted that "class feeling has become practically non-existent in Germany".
As the parliamentary private secretary to Butler, Channon was also in Geneva, where he expressed much loathing for the League in his diary, calling it "that absurd little Assembly" whose meetings were "unsitthroughable".
The bar and lobbies of the League's building are full of Russians and Jews who intrigue with and dominate the press, and spend their time spreading rumors of approaching war, but I don't believe them, not with Neville at the helm.
[21] Channon wrote in his diary that the League of Nations was a "racket" and called the Soviet foreign commissar Maxim Litvinov "the dread intriguer" through "not so evil as Maisky".
Channon remained loyal to the supplanted Neville Chamberlain, toasting him after his fall as "the King over the Water", and sharing Butler's denigration of Churchill as "a half-breed American".
[10] An entry in Channon's diary for 1941, describing his introduction to a young member of the Greek royal family at an Athens cocktail party, is the earliest known reference to the future marriage of Prince Philip of Greece and then 15-year-old heiress presumptive to the British throne, Princess Elizabeth: "He is extraordinarily handsome, and I recalled my afternoon's conversation with Princess Nicholas [an aunt of Philip's].
"[29][30] In his comments accompanying the published selection, Rhodes James stated that "Peter Coats edited the original MS of the Diaries.
[33] Robert Rhodes James quotes in his introduction to the diaries a self-portrait written by Channon on 19 July 1935: Sometimes I think I have an unusual character – able but trivial; I have flair, intuition, great good taste but only second rate ambition: I am far too susceptible to flattery; I hate and am uninterested in all the things most men like such as sports, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war, and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, furniture, glamour and society and jewels.
[34]Comparing the above with the same section in the unexpurgated version of the Diaries gives some idea of how heavily Rhodes James, and/or Coats, laid his editorial hand on the manuscript: Sometimes I think I have the character of a very clever woman - able, but trivial with flair, intuition, great good taste and second-rate ambition: I am susceptible to flattery, and male good looks; I hate and am uninterested in all the things men like such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.
[35]Reviewing the published diaries in The Observer in November 1967, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, "Grovellingly sycophantic and snobbish as only a well-heeled American nesting among the English upper classes can be, with a commonness that positively hurts at times.
[7][43] Reviewing the first volume, Lord Lexden reported in The House magazine, "If diaries are to achieve immortality, the diarist must be a first-class writer.
"[44] Reviewing all three volumes, Joseph Epstein wrote, "A hundred or so pages into the diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon one realizes that this scribbling member of Parliament is a snob, a bigot, vain, self-deceived, entranced by the trivial, a bore and a boor both".