Max Hastings

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week has been described by fellow toilers in Fleet Street as a genuine young eccentric. He's also been called the wildest man ever to edit the Daily Telegraph. He became well known to the general public during the Falklands War, when his dispatches made him a household name. And moreover, the legend was enhanced when he walked into Port Stanley ahead of the British troops. He's also a military historian, later commissioned to write the Oxford History of the Second World War, and he won the Somerset Maugham Prize for Non-Fiction with his book Bomber Command. He is the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings. Max, given your pedigree, your father, MacDonald Hastings, your mother, and Scott James, two redoubtable journalists, was there much doubt that you would not become a journalist?

Max Hastings1:14

I suppose not. Obviously most of us are tremendously conditioned by the environment in which we grow up. And I always loved the business of newspapers and the business of television. And I grew up listening to the gossip of those trades, and it seemed to me the most romantic and exciting business on earth. And I suppose it's very unusual. Some people don't get on with their parents at all. But

Max Hastings1:36

I suppose my father and I agreed about almost everything and I loved all the things that he loved and I wanted to do all the things that he did from a very early age.

Presenter1:44

So, I mean there was no one moment in time when it blindingly came to you that you wanted to be a journalist. You've always want

Max Hastings1:49

Uh

Presenter1:49

wanted to be that oh

Max Hastings1:50

I think it simply seemed, as I watched my father going off on assignments all over the world and I watched his stuff appearing in the papers and his pieces appearing on television that I just thought this is what I want to do. And I was very lucky because before I even went to Oxford, Alastair Milne, who's now Director General of the BBC, gave me a job as a researcher at some tiny pittance at Lime Grove. But I was so bloody grateful for the chance to get a finger into the BBC. And I enjoyed it enormously. And I felt this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. How big an influence?

Presenter2:24

This was your father. I mean, in what way did he affect your life?

Max Hastings2:29

I think simply that I felt I wanted to be what he was. That when I was at school I was terribly bad at games and my left leg never knew what my right arm was doing and I was a disastrous schoolboy. And I used to read my father's accounts of riding the Crest to Run and parachuting and being cast away on desert islands. I felt, gosh, I could never do those things. And of course, when I left school, I felt the first things I had to do would go and ride the Crest to Run, do the parachute course, do some of the exciting assignments to keep up with him. And all right, that's a very adolescent point of view, but it had a tremendous influence on me.

Max Hastings3:04

Indeed, your first choice of record is a reminder of your father, isn't it? Well, I think, yes, I felt that with something like this, that one wants to look back at the different influences in one's life and the things that meant a great deal. And father was a genuine eccentric, and in fact, the piece I've chosen from the Old Tonight programme was one of his great eccentric moments in television. And I admired and adored watching him do these things tremendously.

Speaker 33:30

The best schoolmaster for a dog who chases sheep is a ram.

Speaker 33:35

The ewes, the females, run away. A ram doesn't.

Speaker 33:39

So it's an old established custom in sheep country that if a dog chases sheep, the answer is to couple him with a tuck.

Speaker 33:47

Teach him the hard way that the wool isn't his for the picking.

Speaker 33:52

The treatment doesn't take long.

Speaker 33:55

A few minutes of this, and I assure you that it's no more serious than a sparring match between boxers, is usually enough.

Speaker 34:06

I assure you that I wouldn't allow my Friday in there with the ram unless I'd tried every other way to teach him that a dog who worries sheep could expect something much worse than this.

Speaker 34:22

Alright.

Speaker 34:23

That's enough.

Presenter4:26

Max Hastings, a reminder there of your father. You said yourself that your dad was eccentric. You've been called eccentric yourself. Were you as eccentric as your father?

Max Hastings4:33

I don't think so.

Presenter4:34

Yeah.

Max Hastings4:35

Because father all his life did what he wanted to do. I must admit, although I have my eccentric moments, that I'm a little bit more hard-nosed than father, in that before I sit down to write a book, I think very hard whether I think there's going to be a market for it. And father wrote 30-something books, and he would never stop to think, is there a market for this? Will we get on the bestseller list? He'd just think, this is something I want to write about, this is something I want to do, and go and do it. And that meant that he had a very happy life, but he didn't make much money out of it. It's rather enviable, that's you, isn't it, nonetheless? Oh, yes. At any moment, if he wanted to go and do an assignment somewhere on the other side of the world, or if he wanted to, he'd just look around for someone to pay him to do something he wanted to do anyway.

Presenter5:05

Oh yes.

Presenter5:13

Of course, he was part of that wonderful school of journalists who came out of Picture Post, and I think you're people like Wicker and Philpott and your dad and Kenneth Allsopp and Fife Robertson and they were great reporters and stars as well. Now the Falklands made you that star and when you look back on that experience, what are your memories now of it? What do you remember most of it?

Max Hastings5:33

Yeah.

Max Hastings5:34

It sounds ridiculous to say this with hindsight, but the moment that I heard the task force was sailing, I remember standing in the kitchen at home in Northamptonshire and saying to my wife, I feel it's for this moment that I was born. And that sounds ridiculous to say that. And I remember ringing up Bernard Ingham at Downing Street and saying, unless I can be one of the journalists who goes to the task force, I feel I don't want to go on living anymore. Because I just felt this was a unique moment in British history and I passionately wanted to go with it. And it's very rarely that these things work out exactly as you think they may.

Presenter5:44

That sounds ridiculous to say that.

Max Hastings6:04

And yet for me I suppose the most fulfilling thing I've ever done in my life.

Max Hastings6:08

And one of the things that was most fulfilling, in the nature of things, in the last 20 years in my career, I've spent a lot of time writing about things that the Brits have done badly and things that have gone wrong for Britain. And it was tremendously moving to be with Brits doing something terribly well. And without getting into the whole business of whether the war was a good idea or whether it was necessary or whether it was a foolish, historically, probably it will come to be considered a foolishness, a great eccentricity. But as an experience to be part of, it was enormously moving and I felt incredibly privileged to have the chance to be part of it. Your next choice of music, in fact, is a memory of that time, isn't it? Well, because...

Max Hastings6:46

Again, there was a moment when we were sailing down there on Canberra and there were two or three thousand troops of an evening. You would get on the upper works the ships all clustered round and there were two or three incredibly moving concerts given by the Commando Forces band.

Max Hastings7:02

And although we knew that all over the world people were watching, fascinated, what the task force was doing, out there in the middle of the Atlantic, up on the upper decks with the band playing all the old standards and rural Britannia and sailing and hearts of oak and so on, it just felt here we were all alone in the middle of this vast empty ocean. It was incredibly moving to be just part of this tiny cluster of humanity that suddenly all the world's attention was focussed upon.

Presenter7:29

And the music is.

Max Hastings7:30

Sailing Yeah.

Presenter8:01

And that was in fact the Royal Marine Commando band playing sailing.

Presenter8:05

Max, let's go back to your school days. You you went to Charter House.

Max Hastings8:09

Do you enjoy it? Not much, no. But I suppose one of the things that bad schoolboys comfort themselves with in afterlife is the fact that I think the qualities that make you a success at school in terms of being head of your house or head of school are being willing to conform and being willing to fit in. And I don't actually think those are the qualities that necessarily mean most in afterlife. And I think you probably agree that you need a streak of the anarchist in you to be any good as a journalist. You've got to be willing to go your own way. And I suppose I was a pretty willful and intolerable schoolboy, and the school didn't much care for me, and I suppose I didn't honestly care much for it. You were just marking town waiting to get away from it, were you? I don't know. At that stage, I didn't know what I was capable of doing. I had very little self-confidence. Again, like most schoolboys.

Presenter8:33

And it

Max Hastings8:53

And

Max Hastings8:54

It's all right, it's very easy to look back years later when you find there are some things you can do and make a living at. But when you're that age and you're not good at the things that matter at school, like ball games, and all right, you do quite well in class, but that doesn't matter much among schoolboys, your self-confidence is at a very low ebb. And I suppose the only thing that I learnt at school which has remained with me is an enthusiasm for Gilbert and Sullivan.

Max Hastings9:19

But you you say that you

Presenter9:19

You're no good at at sporting. Yet, I mean, you're not an an athletic chap at all. I mean, your feats are yomping in the Falklands, for instance.

Max Hastings9:25

Well, you learn all that later too, you find afterwards the only thing

Presenter9:25

Will you learn all that later?

Max Hastings9:29

I did enjoy tremendously at school was the cadet force. And everybody in their time at school had to go to cadet force camp in Wales once. And I was thought even more dotty for volunteering to go four times because I actually liked walking over the mountains in Wales. And I did there learn a passion for wildernesses and for mountains. And I did find that I liked the outdoors and I liked roughing it and I liked walking great distances in the wilderness. And that was fun. But again, lots of people who said afterwards, well, why didn't you join the army then? Again, I would have been a terrible soldier because that streak of anarchism I'm sure would have undone me. You went on an exhibition to Oxford University to read history, but left after a year. Why was that? Simply because I terribly wanted to go into journalism. I'd been spoilt by this few months working as a researcher at BBC on the Great War series, which I'd adored. I thought this was the most romantic, exhilarating business in the world. And I'd been happier doing that than anything I'd ever done before. And I simply couldn't wait to get back to it. And when I'd been there a year, to the fury of my family, Charles Winter, the editor of the Evening Standard, offered me a job on London's Diary. And I took it like a shot. And my family were furious. They said, oh, well, if Charles hadn't offered you the job, you wouldn't have been able to leave. But I knew that I wanted to write, and I just couldn't wait to get on with it.

Max Hastings10:44

Let's have another choice of record, Max. Oh, well that's uh the the first old song from Age of Us Pinafore, remembering the one thing that I really learned to enjoy at school.

Speaker 410:55

When I was a lad I served a term as office boy to an attorney's firm. I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor and I polished up the handle of the big front door.

Speaker 411:19

As office boy I made such a mark That they gave me the post of a junior clerk I served the writs with a smile so bland, And I copied all the letters in a big round hand

Speaker 411:37

We all lift in the men so free, but no use of all the things I

Presenter11:43

Max, so your first taste of journalism was on the Evening Standard on the Londoner's Diary, which is a sort of a high tone gossip column, basically. I mean, it's rather a frivolous start for a serious career, wasn't it?

Max Hastings11:53

Yeah.

Max Hastings11:53

I suppose it was that uh I think Charles Winter often used to say to us at that stage I was the the only non Old Etonian on London's Diary, and Charles Mitch used to take a rather cynical view and uh he'd say, Well, none of you may have much talent, but at least you can betray your parents' friends.

Max Hastings12:07

But it was a great training ground because we had a chance to do a wide range of things that one never had again in journalism and to interview film stars and to go and write things about Ascot and then the next week you'll be at the party conferences. The week after that you'll be doing a chess congress in Hastings. And again it was tremendously exciting. I remember the low spot actually in my Creole and London story. I was sent to interview Diana Rigg who then as now was the absolute idol of everybody when she was doing the Avengers. And I was so overcome by this that while waiting for her to appear at the Tretoria Terrazza, I had three or four or five drinks. And by the time she actually arrived I found when I got back to the office I couldn't remember a word she said and had to go through the dreadful humiliation of ringing her up and asking her to say something again over the telephone.

Presenter12:52

How do you get from that point then, that interviewing Diana Rigg and not being able to remember a word she said, to reporting wars, to going abroad? I mean, was this an amazing?

Max Hastings13:02

No, I think people say to me, why did I become a war correspondent? And the answer is I didn't. It was that at the time I came into journalism, there were a lot of wars going on in the world. And I had one tremendous break. About a year or two after I joined the Evening Standard, I got a fellowship to spend a year studying the United States from a journalist foundation in America. And I went there in 1967 and spent that year there during that extraordinary period of tremendous turmoil, riots in the inner cities, assassination of Martin Luther King, assassination of Robert Kennedy, and all the great upheavals of American politics then.

Max Hastings13:38

And I went back after that to do some reporting for the Evening Standard from America. And then after that, when I'd sort of got launched into foreign corresponding and I'd done a rather bad young man's book about America, one assignment followed another. I think my first major one was to Biafra at the end of the Biafran War. And then I started doing the Middle East and Vietnam and all the other things. And these things do snowball. You suddenly find that you're involved in an area of journalism that you start to get interested in and hopefully to learn a little bit about, and one thing leads to another.

Max Hastings14:10

Let's now then have another choice of music. I'd like something from the sixties, the time when I was learning my business. And when I was in America, and it was not a lonely time, I spent a lot of time sitting alone in hotel rooms. And a lot of that time was spent listening again and again and again to a Dion Warwick uh tape and I'd like to have up up and away from that.

Speaker 414:30

Wouldn't you like to ride it in my beautiful balloon?

Speaker 414:36

Wouldn't you like to fly on my beautiful balloon? We could go among the stars together, you and I. But we can fly

Speaker 414:53

Up and up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful boy.

Presenter15:00

I cast away the speaker's Max Hastings, the editor of the Daily Telegraph. Max, you've been in a a fairly short career, actually and gentlemen, comparatively speaking. I mean you're you're a young man, you're you're only forty forty-one, but you are. Compared to what? Compared to me.

Max Hastings15:10

Popular

Presenter15:15

But you've covered something like, what, a dozen wars in that time. I just wonder what kind of effect this has on the individual. I mean, do you find.

Presenter15:24

Now, when you go out to a foreign assignment, do do you find that you're more wary of that assignment, that that you you get more depressed by the prospect of it, or?

Max Hastings15:31

Or what?

Max Hastings15:31

I think most young journalists in their twenties want to go and do the exciting assignments in a rather mindless way, which I couldn't really justify in any sort of higher moral level. You love the idea of the excitement. War is after all one of the most exciting journalistic assignments. And I suppose in the first days when one went to Vietnam, it was the idea of riding round Vietnam in helicopters and living an exciting life and doing one of the big stories of that period that seems so stimulating and thrilling.

Max Hastings16:00

And I suppose we are all fairly irresponsible and deplorable at that age.

Max Hastings16:04

Yes, as one gets older, one's view changes. One gets more deeply affected and more deeply depressed by what you see, and of course more frightened. That one reason why war corresponding is a young man's game is because I passionately believe Lord Morin's view that courage is capital and not income. And whatever slender supply one has, mine was overdrawn years ago. And when I see one of the great modern reporters like Bob Fisk of the Times, who's been reporting brilliantly from Beirut and the Middle East for the last few years, I simply don't know how Bob does it because he's a little bit older than me and how he goes on. Nowadays, I wouldn't for any money go anywhere near Beirut.

Max Hastings16:43

My eldest son was born in nineteen seventy three.

Max Hastings16:46

And covering the Yom Kippur War, I remember for the first time thinking tremendously, consciously, I terribly want to survive this and see my son grow up.

Max Hastings16:55

And when Vietnam ended, I behaved very ingloriously indeed. I'd been asked if I would remain in Saigon and watch the arrival of the North Vietnamese.

Max Hastings17:04

And on the morning of the last day in Saigon, the Americans conducted their big evacuation, and there were about 15 or 20 journalists left, Australian, British, few others.

Max Hastings17:14

By that stage, the whole situation was breaking down very fast. The North Vietnamese were on the edge of the city. We'd watched the airport being heavily shelled that morning.

Max Hastings17:23

There were people shooting at each other in the streets, and we were all getting more and more frightened.

Max Hastings17:28

And I remember sitting in the Reuters' office about lunchtime that day when everybody had gone and there were just these telex girls who we paid a fortune to keep the wires open. And Martin Woollocker of the Guardian, one of the coolest reporters in Vietnam, he was sitting there with me and he said, The next 24 hours in this city are going to be very disagreeable. And then Martin went back to the hotel and I thought, I really don't think I can go through with this. And I ran like a hare to the American embassy and I fought my way through the mob of Vietnamese screaming outside the walls and was pulled up over the walls by the Marines. And I got out with the American choppers that night. And that was a straight cop-out that others stayed to do the job and survived. And I must admit, I simply felt at that time I'm really getting the end of my rather short piece of string for doing this. So I think anybody who ever says kind things about anything I did or didn't do in the Falklands ought to remember that one did lots of fairly cardly things along the line. Cowardly are sensible.

Max Hastings18:23

What about another choice from record? Oh, I think uh Pavarotti, um a little Donizetti.

Speaker 418:36

When I swore the Goda said it

Max Hastings18:38

Oh.

Speaker 418:45

Saviour is filled up all the former the bird of all who are swords.

Presenter19:30

That is very beautiful. Would you give it all up to sing like that?

Max Hastings19:34

I can't see a note.

Presenter19:35

Let's go back to this war correspondent business, which you're very, very good at, made your reputation. You also had a very individual approach, it seems to me. There's a legend that grows up round Fleet Street about Hastings at the front. Let's check in on on on one or two of those legends. I mean, did you, for instance, take a Fortnum and Mason hamper to the Indo-Pakistan war?

Max Hastings19:52

That was true, but actually I did it really to tease. One of the things I've always found delightful about left-wingers is that they have no sense of humour and can be very easily teased. And at the time, I didn't terribly want to go to India to cover that war. And when I was asked, I thought, now, what can I do to make some people in the office crosses? And I thought, make some ridiculous gesture like this. Of course, if no one took any notice of these things, one would never do them. And let me tell you that actually the contents of Fortman's hampers taste quite disgusting in a temperature of 110 degrees. So we suffered for that one. I'll take your word for that. Did you, by the way, also take a shooting stick? Well, that was for very practical reasons. I'm so tall that doing pieces to camera or interviews, if I stand up alongside some little Vietnamese, or for that matter, some little Indian, the shot looks absolutely ridiculous. So I used to sit on a shooting stick in order to get myself down to their level for interviews.

Presenter20:43

One recorded fact in all that, which I know to be true. You did in fact walk into Stanley before the troops. How did you manage that? Well

Max Hastings20:50

Well that was a straightforward stunt which I'm afraid upset some people. I would love not to have been upset. The night before I'd been with 2 Para during their battle for Wireless Ridge which we had no idea was actually going to lead directly to the fall of Stanley. That was intended to simply clear the start line for 3 Paras attack the following day.

Max Hastings21:10

And in fact Tupar had been rather cross with me, because half that night I was so damned tired that about half way through the battle I fell asleep, and only awoke at dawn to be told that our side had won.

Max Hastings21:20

After that we we were suddenly sitting brewing up when the word came that the Argentinians were running.

Max Hastings21:25

And we moved very fast to the edge of the ridge overlooking the bay before Stanley. And it was an incredibly moving moment. Suddenly after all these weeks when we'd been fixated with the idea of Port Stanley and suddenly looking on this wonderful clear, sharp morning across the water and seeing the bungalows of Stanley in the distance. And we suddenly realized that we were on the verge of victory. And the point company under Der Ferrahockley was ordered to advance immediately up the road towards Stanley and I went with them. They were incredibly tired. Unlike me, they hadn't had any sleep for about three nights. And somehow they found the energy to drive themselves on up the road. And then on the edge of Stanley, the word came that it was thought the Argentinians were ready to negotiate, and two para were ordered to stop.

Max Hastings22:13

And when nobody was looking, I thought, well, this is simply too good an opportunity to miss. And I could see no firing on our side of town, could hear n nothing much going on. It was all on the other side of town. So I thought, why not? And it was an old-fashioned journalistic stunt that I thought, well, if somebody doesn't blow my head off, I can bore everybody to death for the next twenty years talking about this. And I stripped off all my military gear and walked in.

Max Hastings22:36

And fortunately nobody did blow my head off and I went up to some rather bemused Argentinians and said I was from the Times because I thought they might have heard of it and then went on to talk to the others. But I felt Tilpara had earned the glory of taking the Redberry and the Stanley and I think they felt a little understandably cross with me that my ridiculous journalistic stunts had sort of cut across the real glory for those of them who won the battle.

Presenter23:01

Yeah.

Max Hastings23:01

What

Presenter23:01

What about your colleagues? I mean, how do they take

Max Hastings23:03

But it's not really a problem.

Presenter23:03

But it's a very

Max Hastings23:06

I think I had a great advantage in that I had done quite a lot of war reporting and also, I must admit, in the school of journalism in which I grew up.

Max Hastings23:15

You are playing to win. You are not playing to play the game. You are playing to get the story first and to get it back first. And some of the Ministry of Defence minders had tried to sort of establish rules for people taking turns for doing this, that and the other. And I have to admit, I'd never taken the slightest notice of that. I'd just done my best to ram my way onto any helicopter or anything that was going on to try and get a story.

Max Hastings23:39

You can't expect to be much beloved for trying to scoop everybody, but next time it'll be somebody else's turn, that you win some, you lose some. When I think of all the other stories I've been on, when other people have covered my face in egg.

Max Hastings23:52

Let's have another choice of music. Uh well I suppose if ever you're travelling on the M1 and you see uh a car full of children singing at the top of their voices, it will be the Hastings family singing uh Flanders and Swans hippopotamus song.

Speaker 424:03

I wonder now what am I to say of the scene that ensued by the Shadimar side. They dived all at once with an ear-spitting splosh, Then rose to the surface again, A regular army of hip-hop tarnie, All singing this haunting refrain, That's you!

Speaker 424:28

Sorry.

Presenter24:34

The splendid Flanders and Swan. Max Hastings, you an editor now, um very respectable now, deskman. How on earth is it a man who's lived all this time on his nerves out on the front line going to

Presenter24:44

Relax into this job.

Max Hastings24:46

Well, it's an interesting feeling, an odd one. I mean, it's a wonderful challenge and opportunity. I'd really made the decision some years ago that I wouldn't go the executive route because I felt that I was a writer. And as you know, most editors are appointed, having been deputed as assistant that over the years. And I really spent the last few years living in the country, writing books, writing a newspaper column once a week for Sunday Times or Standard, and doing a bit of television. And suddenly, Andrew Knight almost literally rang me up one day and said, how would you like to edit the Daily Telegraph? It wasn't quite like that, I guess. Andrew did ask me quite a lot of questions before we actually finally got to that point. But it was one of those magical moments.

Max Hastings25:24

I did agonise over it a lot because I've never run anything and I've never hired or fired anybody. And of course you wonder whether you can do it, whether you can run a staff of more than 300 people or edit a great newspaper. But then I felt, well, if I don't try and do this, I know I'll regret it for the rest of my life. And the Daily Telegraph is a great national institution. What is so marvellous about it that if you take on one or two papers, which I better not name, it's difficult to know where you begin to put them right because there's so much wrong with them. The Daily Telegraph's got so many marvellous people working for it and it's got such great strength that it's really amazing not how much is wrong with it, but how much is right with it.

Speaker 426:01

Yeah.

Max Hastings26:02

But it's a strange light. For me, it's a complete transition. I mean, I start to feel I've never known the meaning of work, that although I've

Presenter26:02

But this is a strength.

Max Hastings26:08

been quite prolific as a writer that actually I go home at the end of the day, usually about eleven o'clock, absolutely at a level of exhaustion I never knew one could read.

Max Hastings26:16

Let's have another choice of record. Well, I've always adored Scotland and spent every spare moment that I have in Scotland uh fishing or shooting or walking on the hills and I always love the pipes, so flowers of the forest.

Presenter27:27

Max Hastings, you've described yourself as being romantic. What exactly do you mean by that?

Max Hastings27:32

I suppose I've always seen England in a rather romantic light. I I think one of the things that makes me conservative is that I like England tremendously the way it is, and I resent the enthusiasm of the radical left to change it from what it is.

Max Hastings27:46

And I suppose in saying that, I mean, I'm very conscious rationally of all the reasons why we've got to change economically and industrially. But I've always loved the study of history and I've always loved English history and what the English have done. And in that sense, I suppose one of the things that has made my life so essentially happy and fulfilled is that I've seen not only the things that I've done myself in a romantic light, which often they probably haven't deserved, but I've also seen the things that people have been doing around me in the same way. I mean, I suppose I've always seen Fleet Street romantically too.

Max Hastings28:17

Let's have a final record.

Max Hastings28:19

Oh, and part of the romantic thing is that I'm one of those people who loves going to Gleinborn for the reasons that opera bluffs think the worst reasons, because I love it as a great English occasion as much as for the music. So something from Mozart's Cosy Fantuiti.

Speaker 428:35

Uh

Speaker 428:40

He's all young on

Speaker 429:01

Please war

Speaker 429:06

Uh

Speaker 429:09

Peace on the side.

Presenter29:26

Reminder there, Max of Dleinborn, for you to take to your desert island. We're now on the desert island, by the way, right? So would you try to escape, do you think? Yeah.

Max Hastings29:34

I'm afraid I would, that I'm chronically restless and I find it very difficult to stay in the same place for more than five minutes.

Presenter29:39

And for the amount of time that you did survive on your desire before you escaped, I mean, are you practical enough a man to make do amend there?

Max Hastings29:46

Well, opinions are divided about this. My wife says not, on the grounds that any shelf I put up usually falls down. So if I uh made a boat, I've got a horrible feeling it might well sink.

Presenter29:56

What about records? Now you've you've picked your eight records. Seven are lost in some awful disaster. Which will be the one that you keep.

Presenter30:03

Oh, I suppose, uh uh the one of my father.

Presenter30:06

Yeah.

Max Hastings30:06

I wonder what what book would you uh have with you on the actual

Max Hastings30:10

Why?

Max Hastings30:11

Oh again, uh as part of all the familiar romantic picture of the English countryside. And what about the one luxury object we allow you? What would that be? Oh, much more down to earth. A word processor linked to a Fleet Street newspaper.

Presenter30:22

Of course. What a silly question to ask you. Max Hastings, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Speaker 430:35

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.