Did You Really Shoot the Television?

A Family Fable

AvMax Hastings

E-bok

Engelska, 2010

86 kr

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Beskrivning

Max Hastings's account of his family's tumultuous 20th century experiences embraces the worlds of fashion and newspapers, theatre and TV, pioneering in Africa and even – his father's most exotic 1960 stunt – being cast away on a desert island in the Indian Ocean.The author is the son of broadcaster and adventurer Macdonald Hastings and journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James. One of his grandfathers was a literary editor while the other wrote plays and essays, and penned an enchanting memoir of his own Victorian childhood. His great-uncle was an African hunter who wrote poetry and became one of Max's heroes. The author tells a richly picaresque story, featuring guest appearances by a host of celebrities from Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad to John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster, who became Anne Scott-James's third husband. 'All families are dysfunctional', Anne asserted impenitently to Max, but the Hastings’ managed to be more dysfunctional than most. His father roamed the world for newspapers and as a presenter for BBC TV's legendary Tonight programme, while his mother edited `Harper's Bazaar’, became a famous columnist and wrote best-selling gardening books.Here, the author brings together this remarkable cast of forebears, 'a tribe of eccentrics', as he himself characterises them. By turns moving, dramatic and comic, the book portrays Max's own childhood fraught with rows and explosions, in which the sudden death of a television set was only one highlight. His story will make a lot of people laugh and perhaps a few cry. It helps to explain why Max Hastings, whose family has produced more than eighty books over three generations, felt bound to follow their path of high adventure and popular journalism.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2010-03-04
Språk:Engelska
Filformat:EPUB
Kopieringsskydd:LCP
ISBN:9780007357116
Förlag:HarperCollins Publishers

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Självbiografier och Memoarer inom Biografier

Mer om författaren

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.

Recensioner i media

Praise for 'Nemesis' '"Nemesis is a triumph!provocative, insightful! impressive!Put all these elements together -- the ambition, insight, sureness of touch -- and you have a book of real quality'. Sunday Times 'Solid scholarship, a supreme understanding of strategy, stirring evocations of battles and trenchant opinion!Hastings proves himself once again to be the master of his material.' Sunday Times 'Books of the Year' 'Magisterial!it is truly cathartic to reach the end of the Second World War in Hastings's company.' Times 'Books of the Year' 'Brilliantly organised, compassionate but unsparing in its judgements!a monumental achievement.' George Steiner, Sunday Times 'Books of the Year' 'Hastings has covered a vast canvas with superbly realised detail, and has provided an excellent companion to Armageddon'. Daily Telegraph 'Absolutely excellent.' John Simpson, Observer 'Hastings is!a master of the sort of detail that illuminates the human cost. It is the way he leaps so adeptly to and fro between the vast panorama and the tiny snapshot pictures that makes him such a readable historian.' Mail on Sunday "Brilliantly though Hastings lays out the strategic context, his real talent lies in his account of the 'terrible human experience' that it involved!This is a book not only for military history buffs but for anyone who wants to understand what happened in half the world during one of the bloodiest periods of the blood-soaked 20th century.' The Spectator 'An outstandingly gripping and authoritative account of the battle for Japan, and a monument to human bravery and savagery.' Daily Telegraph