Sir Max Hastings
Max Hastings at the Financial Times 125th Anniversary Party in London, June 2013
Born	Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings (1945-12-28) 28 December 1945 (age 75) Lambeth, London, England
Nationality	British
Education	Charterhouse School
Alma mater	University College, Oxford
Occupation	Journalist, editor, author
Employer	BBC Evening Standard The Daily Telegraph
	Patricia Edmondson ​ ​ (m. 1972; div. 1994)​ Penelope Levinson ​ ​ (m. 1999)​
Children	3 (1 deceased)
Parents	Macdonald Hastings (father) Anne Scott-James (mother)
Relatives	Clare Hastings (sister)

Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings (; born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of numerous books, chiefly on defence matters, which have won several major awards. Hastings currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion.

Early life

Hastings' parents were Macdonald Hastings, a journalist and war correspondent and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar.^[1] He was educated at Charterhouse and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.

Career

Hastings then moved to the United States, spending a year (1967-68) as a Fellow of the World Press Institute, following which he published his first book, America, 1968: The Fire This Time, an account of the US in its tumultuous election year. He became a foreign correspondent and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC1's Twenty-Four Hours current affairs programme and for the Evening Standard in London.

Hastings was the first journalist to enter Port Stanley during the 1982 Falklands War. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he returned to the Evening Standard as editor in 1996 until his retirement in 2002.^[2] Hastings was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 2002 Birthday Honours for services to journalism.^[3] He was elected a member of the political dining society known as The Other Club in 1993.^[4]

He has presented historical documentaries for the BBC and is the author of many books, including Bomber Command, which earned the Somerset Maugham Award for non-fiction in 1980. Both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year prize. He was named Journalist of the Year and Reporter of the Year at the 1982 British Press Awards, and Editor of the Year in 1988. In 2010 he received the Royal United Services Institute's Westminster Medal for his "lifelong contribution to military literature", and the same year the Edgar Wallace Award from the London Press Club.^[2]

In 2012, he was awarded the US$100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award, a lifetime achievement award for military writing, which includes an honorarium, citation and medallion, sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation.^[5] Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the Royal Historical Society. He was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England from 2002 to 2007.

In his 2007 book Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (known as Retribution in the United States), the chapter on Australia's role in the last year of the Pacific War was criticised by the chief of the Returned and Services League of Australia and one of the historians at the Australian War Memorial, for allegedly exaggerating discontent in the Australian Army.^[6]Dan van der Vat in The Guardian called it "even-handed", "refreshing" and "sensitive" and praised the language used.^[7]The Spectator called it "brilliant" and praised his telling of the human side of the story.^[8]

Hastings wrote a column for the Daily Mail and often contributes articles to other publications such as The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The New York Review of Books. He also currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion.^[9]

Personal life

Hastings lives near Hungerford, Berkshire^[10] with his second wife, Penelope (née Levinson), whom he married in 1999. Hastings has a surviving son and daughter by his first wife, Patricia Edmondson, to whom he was married from 1972 until 1994.^[1] In 2000, his 27-year-old first son, Charles, took his own life in Ningbo, China.^[10][11] He dedicated his book Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-45 which was published in 2007 to his son's memory.^[12]

Political views

Hastings has supported both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. He announced his support for the Conservative Party at the 2010 general election, having previously voted for the Labour Party at the 1997 and 2001 general elections. He claimed that "four terms are too many for any government" and described Gordon Brown as "wholly psychologically unfit to be Prime Minister".^[13]

In August 2014, Hastings was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.^[14]

In June 2019, Hastings described the Conservative Party leadership candidate Boris Johnson as "unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification...[his] premiership will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability...If the price of Johnson proves to be Corbyn, blame will rest with the Conservative party, which is about to foist a tasteless joke upon the British people - who will not find it funny for long."^[15]

In his Bloomberg column on 14 February 2021, Hastings claimed that the United Kingdom's future was unlikely to be long-term. He advocated a United Ireland, but said he was against Scottish and Welsh independence.^[16] Hastings was widely criticised for claiming in the article that the Welsh language was of "marginal value" and that Wales could not succeed as an independent country because it was "dependent on English largesse". One critic wrote: "For the non-English part of the UK that is ... the most integrated with England, it's pretty astonishing how many English commentators have exactly zero political clue about Wales."^[17]

In 2021, Hastings wrote that the prospect of a war between the United States and China over Taiwan was becoming increasingly likely and that China would likely win the war and take over Taiwan.^[18]

Select bibliography

Books

Filmography

• Wellington Bomber, 2010 BBC documentary

See also

• Clan Macdonald of Sleat

References

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Max Hastings at IMDb
• Works by or about Max Hastings in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Max Hastings on Journalisted
• Profile, debretts.com; accessed 2 April 2014.
• Archive of Hastings' articles, The Guardian; accessed 2 April 2014.
• Interview re "Editor: A Memoir", guardian.co.uk; accessed 2 April 2014.
• Profile, pritzkermilitary.org; accessed 2 April 2014.
• Interview on Inferno, Pritzker Military Museum & Library, 16 November 2011; accessed 2 April 2014.
• Winston's War, Pritzker Military Museum & Library, 17 March 2010; accessed 2 April 2014.
• Interview on Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, Pritzker Military Museum & Library, 1 May 2008; accessed 2 April 2014
• Interview on Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945], Pritzker Military Museum & Library, 30 November 2004; accessed 2 April 2014.