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“... shall raise a glass to the memory of a relation whom I never knew – a great-uncle called Aubrey Hastings, who was killed at the Battle of Loos a century ago, on 5 October 1915. In that era of large families, he was one of five of my close forebears who fought in France during the First World War. Three wrote letters and reflections about the trench ...”

“... Winston Churchill​ was the dominant personality on the allied side in the Second World War: not the leader of the most important belligerent, nor even the most influential warlord in the Grand Alliance, but the most significant human being. His prodigious literary skills afterwards enabled him, thanks to the writing, publication and long-lasting celebrity of his war memoirs, immensely to distort the conflict’s historiography ...”

“... Before​ examining the most notorious war crime of the Vietnam era, it seems useful to glance at some other modern horror stories. At 2.15 p.m. on the afternoon of 10 June 1944, a company of the 2nd SS panzer division, ‘Das Reich’, entered the small French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, herded most of its population, swollen by refugees, into barns and garages, the women and children into the church, then killed them with firearms and grenades ...”

“... for this interpretation. The scale and weight of the North Korean attack speaks for itself. And as Max Hastings properly reminds us, the United States deliberately deprived Synghman Rhee’s forces of an offensive capability, as the Soviet Union did not for their own clients. The Pentagon hoped, in the event of a North Korean attack, that US air and sea ...”

“... In the opening paragraph of their important book on the Falklands War, Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins write: ‘So extraordinary an event was it that, even after men began to die, many of those taking part felt as if they had been swept away into fantasy, that the ships sinking and the guns firing round them had somehow escaped from a television screen in the living-room ...”

“... not to be involved in the terrible events in France in June 1944 most readably reconstructed by Max Hastings. On D-Day the notorious 2nd SS Panzer (Das Reich) Division, filled with fanatical Nazis and brutalised by its recent experiences on the Eastern Front, was resting at Montauban some 450 miles from the Channel coast. Even allowing for delays due ...”

“... Something about the British press attracts Canadians. In the 1920s Max Aitken bought the Daily and Sunday Express, turned them into successful popular papers and became Lord Beaverbrook in the process. In the 1950s Roy Thomson bought Kemsley Newspapers, added the Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords ...”

“... history of the Vietnam War, but the range of available sources has widened over the years and Max Hastings has made expert use of them. There is no shortage of memoirs and official papers that shed light on the war from every conceivable American angle. The Vietnamese experience is harder to document, not least because of the secretive and ...”

“... the place-name Huy. Haig, rather surprisingly, is the subject of no anecdotes at all. Wisely, Max Hastings decided not to have five hundred solid pages of anecdote, but to include longer passages describing, in the liveliest prose available, famous events: Horatius holding the bridge, the Waterloo Ball, Rorke’s Drift, the charge at Omdurman and so ...”

“... stories of what happened next. One is the external story, the one the world saw. Black appointed Max Hastings to run the Telegraph, and was able – thanks to the way Rupert Murdoch destroyed the power of the print unions by moving to his new plant in Wapping – to make the paper spectacularly profitable. The printing staff went from 2200 to 507, and ...”

“... Daily Mail and then by its own subsequent and most famous owner, Lord Beaverbrook, who, as Sir Max Aitken, had effectively taken control of the Daily Express in 1915. Perhaps there was always something a bit archaic about the Standard as a national daily. For all the fame of its foreign correspondents – the boys’ author G.A. Henty was one – or the ...”

“... himself on his ability to turn out a thousand good words in no time and under pressure: the reason Max Hastings, who followed him as editor of the Telegraph, and his successors always wanted to keep him on as a writer. He can be cutting about journalists whose main ambition is to rise to an executive level where they only boss around those who write ...”

“... the Times. (Indeed, he might have added that matters are even worse when his own editor-in-chief, Max Hastings, rejects the same offer by declaring that nothing would induce him to go to ‘that brothel’.) But we can’t dismiss these events simply as the consequence of national decline. Something must be gravely wrong with the Times itself when its ...”

“... of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival skills denied. If he is not forced out of office on corruption charges before July 2019, he will be Israel’s longest-serving ...”

“... 16 eyed size 12 with open hostility.’ In some parallel universe I like to think that Max Hastings and Paul Dacre and John Witherow and Alan Rusbridger behave like this. Dominic Lawson may well have said to Charles Moore in some gentleman’s outfitters what Sharon says to Georgina: ‘Well, we can’t both buy this, can we, babe? And I know ...”