Newspaper editor, war reporter and bestselling author, Max Hastings has just turned 80. His father brought him up to embrace adventure, prize physical courage, admit his own mistakes — and marry a woman with fat legs. Did he follow his advice?
Sunday January 04 2026, The Times
In the dying hours of 1945 my father wrote a letter to three-day-old me, telling about the lives of himself and my mother, their hopes and fears for the future. I was given this when I touched 21. After I turned 80 on the 28th of last month, I dug out Daddy’s emotional missive for a refresher read.
Because my parents and both grandfathers were writers, he dreamt that I would follow suit. As Macdonald Hastings he wrote novels, edited magazines and broadcast for the BBC. In the letter, he waxed euphoric about his relationship with my mother. In truth, it was already strained on her side. She once heard Father boast at a party that he had the three things he had always wanted most: a top-of-the range shotgun and fishing rod, together with a beautiful wife.
She wrote later, “I bitterly resented being counted as a chattel with a gun and a rod.” Their marriage eventually ended acrimoniously, after Daddy in one of his dottiest moments had himself cast away on a desert island in the Indian Ocean to show off his survival skills. After six weeks he returned on a stretcher to find Mother departing for the south of France and the divorce court.
But the best excuse for quoting here father’s almost-birthday letter to me is to cheer up Generation Z, which 80 years later fears that it may be doomed. He wrote then, “Europe at the end of 1945 is back in the Dark Ages. The development of the atom bomb has introduced a new and haunting fear. As I write, nothing is easier to believe than that Russia and America will be at war before you read these words.
“Britain, as a result of two wars, is bankrupt. In my lifetime, this country from being the richest in the world has become one of the poorest. Inevitably we’re going to have an anxious economy that will extend, I’m afraid, right into your own grown-up life.”
I need not quote more, because you will have caught the burden of Father’s refrain. As war correspondent of the legendary magazine Picture Post, he had witnessed the European catastrophe and its aftermath. He feared that Britain and maybe the world had had it. Finito. Au revoir. Auf wiedersehen.
As it is, of course, my generation has proved to be the most privileged in human history. We have been incredibly healthy, prosperous, educated. We have been spared participation in a war. A few years back, when I wrote a book about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, I recorded the memories of people all over the world, many of whom feared that we then faced incineration.
I am embarrassed to admit that I have no such personal recollection. My 16-year-old self was preoccupied with getting enough to eat at boarding school and escaping compulsory football. Nuclear weapons, which my father feared would cast a lifelong shadow, have not blotted our sun. We knew that the Bomb existed, that the theoretical possibility of extinction hung over the planet, as it does to this day. But, blindly or no, all but those relatively few who protest-marched to Aldermaston with CND just got on with life.
Daddy himself, despite his bleak speculations, possessed the greatest gift any of us can possess: he knew how to be happy. When I was a teenager, he offered me two pieces of career advice. The first was to “embrace the challenge of a blank sheet of paper”. I could not then understand his meaning, but I do so now. Every time I open a screen, I feel a thrill at the prospect of filling it with words that somebody may want to read.
Daddy’s second pearl of wisdom was more controversial. “Marry a girl with fat legs,” he said, “because they are better in bed.” Since both the women to whom I have been fortunate enough to be married have very thin legs, I still have no idea whether he was right. But when you recall that he addressed that advice to me at 15, when I had zero experience of sex with boy or girl, you will understand why his critics believed that he belonged in secure accommodation.
My mother, who edited magazines and wrote newspaper columns and gardening books under the name of Anne Scott-James, was much cleverer, but lacked Father’s gift for joy. She was a merciless realist, who called a spade a spade and a fool a fool. As Saki wrote in his divine Edwardian short story Reginald on Besetting Sins, or The Woman Who Told the Truth, an excess of frankness is the enemy of social harmony. Saki’s protagonist told the cook she drank: “The cook was a good cook as cooks go, and as cooks go she went.” My mother, until the last days of her life, told my sister and me exactly what we got wrong in our lives, while all that every child wants from their parents is admiration.
Mind you, Mummy was right about a lot of stuff. In her nineties she scolded me, “You have this ridiculous idea that somewhere out there are all these people playing a game of Happy Families from which you have been unjustly excluded. When will you realise that all families are dysfunctional?”
After a rocky start, my life has grown steadily better. By contrast, those who peak early, as school heads of house or captains of games, risk attaining subsequent career climaxes as secretaries of golf clubs. School is the last port of call for us all where conformity can confer laurels. Thereafter, toeing the line and embracing groupthink may fit you to join the Trump cabinet, but will not help turn you into Stephen Hawking, Tim Berners-Lee or Tom Stoppard.
As an adolescent I was a hobbledehoy, hopeless at parties and turned down like a blanket, to borrow PG Wodehouse’s phrase, by more girls than you have had hot dinners. Nonetheless, a little talent and a lot of nepotism secured me wonderful early jobs. I spent years in many countries and attended 11 wars as a reporter and TV presenter. Those were the days, my friends, those were the days. In the media we were poorly paid but granted fabulous opportunities.
My father reared me to seek adventures and to prize physical courage. He was right about the fun of the adventures, but wrong to rate bravery so highly. Moral courage is more important than the battlefield sort, and women more often have it.
Our education should rightfully continue to the grave. In old age, Daddy once wrote to me ruefully, expressing regret that he had been a better talker than listener. I inherited his vice. In my next life I shall be more discreet, and discover patience.
Yet lots of successful people are incapable of either, including Margaret Thatcher. In 1973, I was sent to interview her when she was education secretary. Emerging from her office after a gruelling exchange, I pressed the lift button. Thatcher heaped scorn on my laziness: “What are you thinking of, taking a lift? You’re young and fit. Walk!”
At 39 — to Thatcher’s horror, not diminished when we made her daughter redundant — I was appointed to the editorship of the Daily Telegraph. In the succeeding 16 years, there and at the London Evening Standard, I belatedly discovered how to have grown-up relationships with women and to embrace them as peerless colleagues.
I learnt that if you run anything, people will forgive you for making bad decisions but not for failing to make them. Also vital is the distribution to others of praise for success, while oneself taking the rap for disaster. Nowadays I would not last long as a boss since it has become impossible to chastise weak vessels, never mind to sack them.
My proprietor of the Telegraph days, the Canadian Conrad Black, put up with frankness from me such as few of his peers would have tolerated. When first he came to London, I said, “Conrad, you are being fêted and courted by lots of important people, but we must never forget that the play of human affairs is always a comedy. We all look equally ridiculous in the bath.” I am convinced that Conrad would not have ended up in a federal penitentiary had he not forgotten this fact of life.
I saw much of the manner in which some rich folks use their money as a club with which to beat down critics. At the Standard I made Sir James Goldsmith, the bullying tycoon who started the Referendum Party, forerunner of Reform, the object of persistent mockery. One day his lawyer called me and said, “I am instructed by Sir James to tell you that when the election is over [this was 1997], he intends to destroy you.”
At a drinks event a few days later I encountered Carla Powell, wife of Thatcher’s former private secretary Lord Powell and a passionate supporter of Goldsmith. A stage Italian, she lambasted me for attacking her hero and shrieked, “Jeemy will get you! Jeemy will get you!” I responded, “Come off it, Carla, this isn’t Palermo,” and indeed Jeemy never did make good on his threat to send me to sleep with the fishes.
I have always overdone both loves and hates. A friend suggested the other day that I should abandon the practice of denying entry into our house to unrepentant Brexiteers, and I know he is right.
Yet what fun most of it has been. There is far more contentment in being 80, and saying “Phew” as one looks back, than I had imagined possible when I was an unloveable teenager. Much of this is thanks to my wife, Penny, to my children and grandchildren, but nobody’s story is plain sailing.
A woman sitting next to me at a big dinner gushed about how everybody at the table was so lucky. Up to a point, I said. I knew most of the guests well enough to be familiar with their private sorrows. I quoted a Jewish saying of Penny’s: “If you make everyone at the table lay down their troubles, you take a look at everybody’s else, then pick up your own and walk away.”
After quitting editing in 2002, I learnt much more about human tragedy from interviewing people for my books. I was once fool enough to ask a very old Chinese man, who lived through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the Thirties, whether there had been much pleasure in his young life. He stared at me. “Pleasure? How can you ask such a question? All we knew was work, hunger, fear.”
Even among privileged Westerners who have never known what it was like to eat leaves, as had that old man, few of us secure a tear-free passage from the cradle to the grave; the contentment of old age should never mean complacency.
On December 31, 1945, my father ended his long screed to me, “I’m going to fold this letter now, still wet from my pen — unread by anybody, even your mother — and put it away till you’re old enough to value it for what it is. Meanwhile, good luck to you, my boy. And a good life. Your loving father.”
“Mac’s” gloomiest 1945 fears for our country and the planet have gone unfulfilled. Because this is so, I feel able to urge optimism now, such as all of us oldies owe to our children and grandchildren. Most things turn out less well than we hope, but less badly than we fear. So it will almost certainly prove for Generation Z, even if they enjoy fewer of the privileges that have been ours, supremely fortunate offspring of the late 20th century.