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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 who had all the remaining unpublished Byron letters.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.

Finished 'Lady Susan'.

There was a fairly active form of censorship for American periodicals. Postal subscribers did not have their copies tampered with in the mails, but on several occasions, during the Abdication crisis and after, people who bought copies of Time and other American news magazines from the bookstalls found whole pages torn out.

And F.L. Allen's Only Yesterday, which presented the social life of the American Twenties in terms of fashion and current topics as well as of public events. Both books sold well in England, and had imitators. This documenting of life as it had really been served more than an official purpose; it was entertainment--a dramatic crystallization of the news that flowed in a haphazard stream through the newspapers.

A new Bill was brought forwared in 1936 [...] to prohibit the advertisement of cures for blindness, cancer, consumption, epilepsy, paralysis, and Bright's disease. At the second Commons reading, however, in March, the House was counted out--the reason being that it was the day of the Grand National Steeplechase, which most members had gone to watch. The patent medicine business continued.

[Serials on BBC radio, on Sunday evenings:]]
In certain cases these performances coincided with Evensong, and a clergyman complained to the Radio Times that not only was his congregation severely depleted, but that he himself regretfully missed every other instalment of the current serial through taking Evensong on alternate Sundays.

[Coronation of George 6:]
The American touch was provided by Neile Vanderbilte, the millionaire's son. He had secured a ticket for the Abbey, and during the ceremony was seen to be praying constantly into his waistcoat: where he was broadcasting a commentary through a pocket radio transmitter. This was picked up by his trailer, parked a few hundred yards away, and from there transmitted direct to the United States...

[On the fire that destroyed the Crystal Palace in 1936]:
The fire, the most spectacular one of the century, completely destroyed the main building and only the twin towers at either end were left standing. The current rumour was that the Palace had been deliberately fired, as offering a too prominent landmark to German bombers.

[of the Press]:
Royalty was not fair game because, by etiquette, forbidden to reply. The last recorded offence was by a famous sporting sheet in the Nineties which headed its news column one week with the gratuitous statement that 'there was nothing whatever between the Prince of Wales and Lily Langtry' and the next week with the absolutely unrelated remark: 'Not even a sheet.'

The only really successful colour films at this time were cartoons, and especially the Silly Symphonies of Walt Disney. Disney's black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons had been popular with the public for some years. His Silly Symphonies proved even more popular.

Nicky was half English and had been at school in England, and both he and Constantine had recently come down from Oxford, where Constantine, I learnt with delight, had not taken a valet in high Edwardian style, but, to everyone's wonder, a Rumanian chambermaid.

Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings.

I wasn't the first script editor to sense that Marc [Platt] had talent, and the peculiar knack that might make for a really good Doctor Who writer. The first piece of writing he'd ever sent in to the show had elicited a letter from the legendary Doctor Who script editor (and writer) Robert Holmes, who had said, 'Of the many unsolicited scripts I receive every year, yours was the only one of any merit whatsoever.'

He was there until 3.00 am trying to put things right and he was back again now. The other special effects guys didn't understand his concern. 'Are you still working on it?' Poor Lindsay. He was talented and he cared about what he was doing and he'd tried to make Doctor Who look good; and someone stole his airbrush last night.

'The Chimeron baby was cool,' observed Lindsay MacGowan, in reference to one of the effects from the last shoot. Lindsay came into the studio yesterday to see what they'd done to the monster he'd designed. What they'd done was added a neck, broken all the spines off and got the colours all wrong.

Steven Moffat, on Russell T Davies' and Ben Cook's 'The Writer's Tale':
'reading it, for me, was like taking possession of a big scary mansion, and finding the tearstained diary of the previous occupant (whereabouts unknown).'

Pausing again, in my read of the complete Poirot. I don't approve of the approach this editor has taken, of replacing stories with their much-later rewrites. It especially stands out, in stories from 1923, when the children go off to play with their tape recorders, and Poirot mentions television. On the other hand, the 1961 version of 'Christmas Pudding' was refreshingly brilliant. Chef's kiss indeed.

Resumed after a break. Read 'The Veiled Lady' today. I plan to read to 'The Lemesurier Inheritance' and then pause again.

For years I had been haunted by the fear that the Junior Ganymede club book, with all the dynamite it contained, would get into the wrong hands, and the hands it had got into couldn't have been more the sort of hands you would have wished it hadn't.