Ever since I met Chips Channon when I was still a teenager, I’ve thought there was an uncanny visual likeness between him and Frederick the Great.
The similarity is evident in photographs of the middle-aged Sir Henry Channon (1897-1958) in this third, final and most graphic record of his vivid life. There’s the same stocky figure, quizzing eyes, veiled smile and faint sneer, evident in portraits of the Prussian king.
And Channon shared many of Frederick’s traits: a thirst for power, politics, international intrigue and gossip, a passion for rococo palaces and pretty bibelots, a charm-laden pugnaciousness, haphazard generosity, and a fancy for tall, good-looking young men.
In all these respects, Chips was an 18th-century figure, with sentiment, the leisured-but-ruling classes, the presumed power and political influence intrinsic to that not-so-far-off time.
