Max Hastings
Non-Fiction Author of the Month
Author of Listening to the Animals: How I Became a Super Vet, How Animals Saved My Life: Being the Super Vet and Dogs and their Humans.
Sir Max Hastings is an author, journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper. He is now a columnist for The Times of London and for Bloomberg Inci and reviews regularly for the Sunday Times. He has published over thirty books.
He has presented many TV documentaries. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, London, he has also received honorary degrees from Leicester and Nottingham universities. He was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England 2002-2007, and a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery 1995-2004. He was knighted in 2002 for services to journalism.
Looking for something specific?
Max Hasting Q&A
What was the first book you ever fell in love with?
The Once and Future King by THWHITE, today almost forgotten, yet his tale of King Arthur in childhood and beyond is a masterpiece of storytelling for adults and children alike.
What book is currently on your bedside table?
PERSPECTIVES, a brilliant historical novel by Laurent Binet about rulers and painters in 16th Century Florence which is wonderfully original and gripping
Where do you go for inspiration?
My library and any archive. I find myself still boundlessly curious about the past and human behaviour.
What’s your top tip for helping the planet?
Change America’s president.
If you could go back in time and give your younger self advice, what would it be?
Spend less time talking and more listening. I wish I had better heeded GK Chesterton’s advice to my own father: ‘Young man, as you go through life you will meet two kinds of great men - little great men, who make all those around them feel little, and great great men, who make all those around them feel great. I need not tell you which is better loved.’
