Catastrophe

BOOK OF THE YEAR AS CHOSEN BY THE INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND SPECTATOR. Like one of Field Marshal Haigs family whiskies, Max Hastings is a dram that steadily improves with age His position as Britains leading military historian is now unassailable In this enormously impressive new book, Hastings effortlessly masters the complex lead-up to and opening weeks of the First World War [He] is as magisterial as we would expect This is a magnificent and deeply moving book, and with Max Hastings as our guide we are in the hands of a master Nigel Jones, Telegraph Hastings is the author of consistently good histories of WWII. But with Catastrophe he has reached a new level of excellence The Times 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 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 Observer

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 Kings 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.