Most Popular Books by Max Hastings

Renowned historian Max Hastings recreates one of the most thrilling events of World War II: Operation Pedestal, the British action to save its troops from starvation on Malta—an action-packed tale of courage, fortitude, loss, and triumph against all odds. In 1940, Hitler had two choices when it came to the Mediterranean region: stay out, or commit sufficient forces to expel the British from the Middle East. Against his generals’ advice, the Fuhrer committed a major strategic blunder. He ordered the Wehrmacht to seize Crete, allowing the longtime British bastion of Malta to remain in Allied hands. Over the fall of 1941, the Royal Navy and RAF, aided by British intelligence, used the island to launch a punishing campaign against the Germans, sinking more than 75 percent of their supply ships destined for North Africa. But by spring 1942, the British lost their advantage. In April and May, the Luftwaffe dropped more bombs on Malta than London received in the blitz. A succession of British attempts to supply and reinforce the island by convoy during the spring and summer of 1942 failed. British submarines and surface warships were withdrawn, and the remaining forces were on the brink of starvation. Operation Pedestal chronicles the ensuing British mission to save those troops. Over twelve days in August, German and Italian forces faced off against British air and naval fleets in one of the fiercest battles of the war, while ships packed with supplies were painstakingly divided and dispersed. In the end only a handful of the Allied ships made it, most important among them the SS Ohio, carrying the much-needed fuel to the men on Malta. As Hastings makes clear, while the Germans claimed victory, it was the British who ultimately prevailed, for Malta remained a crucial asset that helped lead to the Nazis’ eventual defeat. While the Royal Navy never again attempted an operation on such scale, Hasting argues that without that August convoy the British on Malta would not have survived. In the cruel accountancy of war, the price was worth paying.

In February 2002 Max Hastings retired from his position as a ''Fleet Street'' Editor. His is an enormously illustrious career which started in 1985, when he was offered the Editorship of a national institution-the Daily Telegraph-in a surprise move by its owners. This candid memoir tells the story of what happened to him, and to a great newspaper, over the next decade.It is all here: the rows with prime ministers, the coverage of great events, the daily routine. Max Hastings describes his complex relationship with his proprietor, Conrad Black. He offers an extraordinary perspective on the decline of John Major, the troubles of the Royal Family, the difficulties of dealing with lawyers and celebrities, statesmen and stars. It is above all the story of the excitement and exhilaration of almost 10 years at the helm of one of the greatest newspapers in the world.

One of Bookbub''s Best Nonfiction of 2025 From the best-selling military historian, a thrilling account of the valiant British role in the D-Day invasion. Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day—June 6, 1944—the lives of British soldiers changed. Thiry-five thousand infantrymen, airmen, and special service operatives were sent headfirst into the whitest heat of war, almost overnight. Max Hastings’s Sword Beach tells the story of a handful of British soldiers and their critical role in D-Day’s parachute and seaborne offensive. On Sword, the codename of one of the two beaches assaulted by the British, scores of soldiers were killed by the first shots that they ever heard fired in anger. One British corporal insisted on apologizing to his enemy prisoners, and the Free French troops, 120-men strong, suffered 60 percent losses in the first days of fighting. With his signature blend of drama and detail, Hastings shows how the men who landed on Sword played a critical role in Britain’s preeminent landmark victory and the most spectacular battlefield event of World War II in the West. Sword Beach fills in many of the missing pieces and human stories that have long been left out of the sweeping macro-stories of the Normandy invasion. Based on published memoirs, interviews with D-Day veterans, and rigorous research, Hastings lends color and shade to the climactic action of the Western Front’s most famous battle. Sword Beach describes the lives of a small number of men, on a single day, who faced the immediate transition from make-believe battle to the war’s most violent circumstances.

A Times History Book of the Year 2022 From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph

Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded. In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis—America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors. Combining in-depth research with Hasting’s well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today. Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.

The last weeks of World War II on the Western Front in Europe witnessed extraordinary scenes of heroism, horror, melodrama and pathos.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A masterly history of the Dambusters raid from bestselling and critically acclaimed Max Hastings.

This is a collection of rural writings celebrating the pleasures of the country life - in particular fishing and shooting - by the eminent military historian and former editor of ''The Daily Telegraph'', Sir Max Hastings.

Best Nonfiction of 2020 -- Kirkus Reviews Now in paperback, one of the most lauded historians of our time returns to the Second World War in this magnificent retelling of the awe-inspiring raid on German dams conducted by the Royal Army Force''s 617 Squadron. The attack on Nazi Germany''s dams on May 17, 1943, was one of the most remarkable feats in military history. The absurdly young men of the Royal Air Force''s 617 Squadron set forth in cold blood and darkness, without benefit of electronic aids, to fly lumbering heavy bombers straight and level towards a target at a height above the water less than the length of a bowling alley. Yet this story--and the later wartime experience of the 617 Squadron--has never been told in full. Max Hastings takes us back to the May 1943 raid to reveal how the truth of that night is considerably different from the popularized account most people know. The RAF had identified the Ruhr dams as strategic objectives as far back as 1938; in those five years Wing Commander Guy Gibson formed and trained the 617 Squadron. Hastings observes that while the dropping of Wallis''s mines provided the dramatic climax, only two of the eight aircraft lost came down over the dams--the rest were shot down on the flight to, or back from, the mission. And while the 617 Squadron''s valor is indisputable, the ultimate industrial damage caused by the dam raid was actually rather modest. In 1943, these brave men caught the imagination of the world and uplifted the weary spirits of the British people. Their achievement unnerved the Nazi high command, and caused them to expend large resources on dam defenses--making the mission a success. An example of Churchill''s "military theatre" at its best, what 617 Squadron did was an extraordinary and heroic achievement, and a triumph of British ingenuity and technology--a story to be told for generations to come. Operation Chastise includes three 8-page black-and-white photo inserts and 6 maps.

This book traces to its historical roots the explosive uprising situation of Northern Ireland. It provides first-hand, behind the barricades account of the bitter Protestant/Catholic clashes in Belfast, Bogside, and Derry, and analyzes the desperate struggle for power in high Ulster government circles. Filled with balances, perceptive profiles of leaders and key figures in both camps, this book of the times clearly illuminates the bewildering landscape of Irish politics in a narrative which resembles the force and urgency of a battlefront dispatch. It presents a compassionate, sobering, and scrupulously accurate report on a tragic situation whose seeds of hate and bitterness were sown centuries ago, and for which a permanent solution was hard to forsee. -- Publisher description

Within Western culture, World War Two continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explanation is that it was the greatest and most terrible event in human history. Within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity. Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations which hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension. Hastings tells the story of the war in a clear and compelling narrative, ranging across a vast canvas from the agony of Poland in 1939 and the horrors of the Soviet front to the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan in August 1945. This is a book which shows vividly what war meant for individuals from allied soldiers, sailors and airmen, to SS killers, to civilians caught up in the war like British housewives who endured the Blitz and the citizens of Leningrad who suffered through a siege of almost unimaginable horror.