Catastrophe

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-six books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King's College, London and was knighted in 2002. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

'Magnificent ... Hastings writes with an enviable grasp of pace and balance, as well as an acute eye for human detail. Even for readers who care nothing for the difference between a battalion and a division, his book is at once moving, provocative and utterly engrossing' Sunday Times 'Masterly ... Hastings is a brilliant guide to that strange, febrile twilight before Europe plunged into darkness. Writing in pungent prose suffused with irony and underpinned by a strong sense of moral outrage, 'Catastrophe' is a frontal assault on what Hastings calls the "poets' view" ... This is history-writing at its best, scholarly and fluent ... for anyone wanting to understand how that ghastly, much-misunderstood conflict came about, there could be no better place to start than this fine book' The Times 'One could scarcely ask for a better guide to these horrors than Max Hastings ... he is a superb writer with a rare gift for evoking the rhythm, mood and raw physical terror of battle ... If you are looking for a humane and compelling interpretive chronicle of the formative months of this horrific conflict, you will find none better' Mail on Sunday 'Very readable. Character, pace, sense of landscape, battlefield detail - all are superbly done ... it's a splendid read' The Observer "No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening', wrote Churchill, and Max Hastings does full justice to its appalling drama. He is, unashamedly - thankfully - a historian in the Barbara Tuchman tradition and 'Catastrophe' is rich in unexplored sources from every side of the conflict and every theatre of the war' David Crane, The Spectator 'Vivid and compelling ... superbly detailed and nuanced ... Hastings is a master of the pen portrait and the quirky fact ... yet his greatness as a historian - never shown to better effect than in this excellent book - lies in his willingness to challenge entrenched opinion' Saul David, Evening Standard