Book description
Max Hastings's account of his family's tumultuous 20th century
experiences embraces the worlds of fashion and newspapers, theatre and
TV, pioneering in Africa and even - his father's most exotic 1960 stunt
- being cast away on a desert island in the Indian Ocean.
The author is the son of broadcaster and adventurer Macdonald Hastings
and journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James. One of his
grandfathers was a literary editor while the other wrote plays and
essays, and penned an enchanting memoir of his own Victorian childhood.
His great-uncle was an African hunter who wrote poetry and became one of
Max's heroes. The author tells a richly picaresque story, featuring
guest appearances by a host of celebrities from Thomas Hardy and Joseph
Conrad to John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster, who became Anne
Scott-James's third husband. 'All families are dysfunctional', Anne
asserted impenitently to Max, but the Hastings' managed to be more
dysfunctional than most. His father roamed the world for newspapers and
as a presenter for BBC TV's legendary Tonight programme, while his
mother edited 'Harper's Bazaar', became a famous columnist and wrote
best-selling gardening books.
Here, the author brings together this remarkable cast of forebears, 'a
tribe of eccentrics', as he himself characterises them. By turns moving,
dramatic and comic, the book portrays Max's own childhood fraught with
rows and explosions, in which the sudden death of a television set was
only one highlight. His story will make a lot of people laugh and
perhaps a few cry. It helps to explain why Max Hastings, whose family
has produced more than eighty books over three generations, felt bound
to follow their path of high adventure and popular journalism. Praise
for 'Nemesis'
'“Nemesis is a triumph…provocative, insightful… impressive…Put all
these elements together - the ambition, insight, sureness of touch - and
you have a book of real quality'. Sunday Times
'Solid scholarship, a supreme understanding of strategy, stirring
evocations of battles and trenchant opinion…Hastings proves himself once
again to be the master of his material.' Sunday Times 'Books of the Year'
'Magisterial…it is truly cathartic to reach the end of the Second World
War in Hastings's company.' Times 'Books of the Year'
'Brilliantly organised, compassionate but unsparing in its judgements…a
monumental achievement.' George Steiner, Sunday Times 'Books of the Year'
'Hastings has covered a vast canvas with superbly realised detail, and
has provided an excellent companion to Armageddon'. Daily Telegraph
'Absolutely excellent.' John Simpson, Observer
'Hastings is…a master of the sort of detail that illuminates the human
cost. It is the way he leaps so adeptly to and fro between the vast
panorama and the tiny snapshot pictures that makes him such a readable
historian.' Mail on Sunday
“Brilliantly though Hastings lays out the strategic context, his real
talent lies in his account of the 'terrible human experience' that it
involved…This is a book not only for military history buffs but for
anyone who wants to understand what happened in half the world during
one of the bloodiest periods of the blood-soaked 20th century.' The Spectator
'An outstandingly gripping and authoritative account of the battle for
Japan, and a monument to human bravery and savagery.' Daily Telegraph
Max Hastings studied at Charterhouse and Oxford and became a foreign
correspondent, reporting from more than sixty countries and eleven wars
for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. He has won many awards for
his journalism. Among his bestselling books 'Bomber Command' won the
Somerset Maugham Prize, and both 'Overlord' and 'Battle for the
Falklands' won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize. After ten
years as editor and then editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, he
became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. A Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature, he was knighted in 2002. He now lives in
Berkshire.
