Blay is a talent, mixing an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, past and present, with incisive commentary on race and gender.

Blay's welcome voice is candid, vulnerable and necessary. Her observations about the impact Black women have had and continue to have on pop culture are searing and timely and will have a lasting impact on how much the world sees and understands us.

Alongside perceptive ruminations on everything from colourism to Cardi B, Blay writes with refreshing candour on topics that will resonate with Black women, the world over. Her passion and incredible knowledge on all things race, gender and pop culture-related make this book a standout and one you'll struggle to put down.

Blay's idea of Black womanhood is an inclusive one, where liberation is not just possible, but doable because it has the space for all Black women?cisgender, transgender, rich, poor, old, young, local, global?magnifying the potential for unity (and success) against the forces which mean them harm. Each essay carries with it truths that feel ancestral. Carefree Black Girls is the testimony I've been waiting to witness.

"Blay's personal experiences with astute cultural analysis to explore how joy has become one of the most useful weapons in a Black woman's arsenal.

Blay tells her Black girl truth and in so doing doesn't simply reclaim the narrative but constructs an entirely new one on her own firm and fertile ground.

An exuberant exploration of the ways Black women have defined pop culture. The creator of the viral #CareFreeBlackGirl cultural movement, Blay ventures beyond the "pithy, abstracted, tweet-able" declarations about Black women being "indeed essential to the... global zeitgeist" to offer a kaleidoscopic analysis of how American culture both needs and "belittles" Black female artists and storytellers such as herself....This fervent work will feel like a balm for many.

Blay is one of the most formidable cultural critics writing today. Her words reflect intellect, wit, and a level of thoughtfulness that has long made her required reading. I love her candor, I love her passion, but above all, I adore the way she writes about Black women.

Gripping reading . . . While countless of Chip's decent contemporaries and especially politicians are today forgotten, the diaries make him an indispensable source for anyone writing of this period.

A fabulous potpourri of first-hand history, snobbish gossip, acute insight and stomach-churning enthusiasm for Nazism (by no means unique among the British upper-classes at the time). Channon was vain, funny, bitchy, clever, pithy and fabulously well-connected: all the qualities of a superb diarist.

Chips perfectly embodied the qualities vital to the task: a capacious ear for gossip, a neat turn of phrase, a waspish desire to tell all, and easy access to the highest social circles across Europe . . . Blending Woosterish antics with a Lady Bracknellesque capacity for acid comment. Replete with fascinating insights.

Chips Channon, the bisexual snob and socialite who hobnobbed (and more) with royalty, politicians and famous writers . . . a new, expanded version of his disclosures has left some readers gasping at his audacity, indiscretion and promiscuity.

A masterpiece of storytelling and character assassination . . . Heffer's footnoted forays into Burke's and the Almanach de Gotha are worth reading alone for the picture they paint of a world so shifting and slippery that forging an identity is as much an act of will as an accident of history.

Channon is a delightful guide, by turns frivolous and profound.

A compelling account of the extraordinary times of interwar Britain. Reading Chips is like eating a rich cream. Impossible to put down. A superb edition of an indispensable chronicle.

Heffer has done a stupendous job. Eminently worth publishing.

I cannot put down Simon Heffer's wonderful edition of Chips Channon's diaries . . . Channon was a natural diarist - observant, gossipy, snobbish, disarming, preposterous, agonised and, more rarely, horrible.

Channon, then, was a cipher for his times. An unremarkable politician, a mediocre intellect, and the morals of an alley cat on Viagra, did not prevent him from being the most acute commentator on his era.

This enthralling book confirms Channon as the "greatest British diarist of the 20th century" . . . It's packed with "weapons-grade above-stairs gossip" and superb one-line put-downs: Stravinsky looks "like a German dentist" . . . it provides an unrivalled guide to society and politics in the interwar years.

In his heyday, Tory politician Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon knew everyone and was present at almost every big event of the first half of the Twentieth Century . . . The diary is a whopper but there are gems on every page. Highly recommended and I'm looking forward to volumes two and three.

Many complicated human relations are on display in these irresistible diaries . . . The editor deserves the greatest praise. He has rightly included everything that brings Channon's shimmering brittle world to life . . . He has a gift for the sharp, striking phrase which bring events to life. If diaries are to achieve immortality, the diarist must be a first-class writer. Channon passes that with flying colours.

Better than any history or histories of these two decades . . . like a fusion of Debrett's and the Almanach de Gotha . . . Scrupulously scholarly . . . Simon Heffer has done a great service by revealing in this extraordinary new edition of the Channon diaries the decadence and complacency of the English political and upper classes.

The abundant footnotes . . . swarm with everything you might want to know about the British aristocracy between the wars . . . It's like reading Bertie Wooster set loose among the pages of Burke's Peerage, with lots of sucking-up where the jokes ought to be . . . His pen portraits of friends and rivals alike are etched in acid.

The fascinating, unexpurgated interwar diaries of the Tory MP and social alpinist Henry "Chips" Channon, who met everyone who was anyone from Hitler to kings, the Pope and the Mitfords. Bonking, snobbery and bitchy remarks abound in this big beast of a book.

I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume. My most pleasurable reading experiences are diaries and letters. History unfiltered, not refracted through a historian's imagination. The Chips Channon diaries bring alive a section of society in the 20s and 30s with great vividness.

Chips Channon wrote witheringly about everyone-except Hitler. But his diaries still make for strangely addictive reading . . . [Simon Heffer] has done a superb job.

These unabridged, risqué, waspish, snobbish, social-climbing diaries have been worth the wait . . . All credit to Simon Heffer for his masterly editing and annotation.

The diaries are indeed indispensable for anyone seriously interested in the political and social history of interwar Britain.

Brilliantly and painstakingly edited by Simon Heffer. The enlarged Channon diaries have rightly attracted a great deal of attention . . . they are more detailed and more frank, and maybe more honest, about the opinions and sexual escapades of some of the leading figures in British politics and high society in the years between the world wars.

It sounds perverse to say that Channon's snobberies and prejudices make the diaries, but the unabashed exposure of these failings gives you an oddly impressive picture of a person in the setting of his time - the picture, I mean, is absorbing, whatever the subject's shortcomings. And though this colossal self-portrait describes much that's misguided, vain, and idiotic, it prompts you too to imagine those perishable qualities that history and biography so often fail to capture: the charm, generosity, personal magnetism, and brilliance of conversation that must have explained and sustained Chips's progress, the "success after success" that the diaries record and celebrate.

One of the most talked about books of this year . . . compelling and significant.

Channon's jaw-dropping account, lovingly curated by the historian and former Mail writer Simon Heffer, is compelling.

Delicious, dangerous and utterly compulsive.

Dripping with bons mots, anecdote and scandal, [these] are addictive, even if they elicit repulsion as well as delight.

A momentous publishing event. Candid, unabashed, vivid and manifold. They will be prized for their powerful evocation of social milieux . . . Heffer's footnotes are always informative, just and accurate, often amusing, and can seldom be faulted.

An unadulterated masterpiece . . . A larder of quotable treats.

Scintillating wit, memorable descriptions and compelling gossip. Heffer has done a magnificent job. Riveting.

Whatever you think of him Channon ranks among the great diarists. He is at turns brilliant, witty, trivial and spiteful, with observations about some figures whose names have stood the test of time. Simon Heffer has done an excellent job as editor and his copious footnotes are often as entertaining as the diaries.

An inspired diarist. After devouring this volume readers will be salivating for the next.