Michael Hastings – författare

The inspiration for the upcoming movie WAR MACHINE, starring Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton and Ben Kingsley (streaming on Netflix from 26 May).General Stanley McChrystal, the innovative commander of international and US forces in Afghanistan, was living large. Loyal staff liked to call him a 'rock star'. During a spring 2010 trip across Europe to garner additional Allied help for the war effort, McChrystal was accompanied by journalist Michael Hastings of ROLLING STONE. For days, Hastings looked on as McChrystal and his staff let off steam, partying and openly bashing the Obama administration for what they saw as a lack of leadership. When Hastings' piece appeared a few months later, it set off a political firestorm: McChrystal was ordered to Washington, where he was unceremoniously fired.In THE OPERATORS, Hastings gives us a shocking behind-the-scenes portrait of Allied military commanders, their high-stakes manoeuvres and often bitter bureaucratic in-fighting. He takes us on patrol missions in the Afghan hinterlands and to hotel bars where spies and expensive hookers participate in nation-building gone awry, drawing back the curtain on a hellish complexity and, he fears, an unwinnable war.

“If Lee Harvey Oswald did it, he could not have done it alone. If he did not, he must be the hit of the century. If he was involvedand somehow double-crossed, alive today must be persons with the guilt of awful silence.”Dallas, Texas. 12.30pm. Friday, 22 November 1963. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. 48 hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald himself was murdered.Told through the eyes of Oswald’s wife and mother, coupled with extracts from the Warren Commission’s report, we follow the unsettled drifting life of Lee Harvey Oswald – his loveless marriage to his Russian wife, his challenging relationship with his mother and his pathological hatred of Kennedy’s life and achievements. Oswald had the means, motive and opportunity, but did he even do it? Could a man who never did anything on his own murder a President?

The work-room of a Savile Row tailors, 1953. Two master craftsmen at daggers drawn: Polish-born Spijak insists that nothing can beat the excellence of a hand-sewn suit, while Eric uses his machine to work at twice the speed and earn twice the money. Sparks fly as each fights his own corner with biting wit and vicious humour. Into this battleground steps Maurice, a teenager at the very start of his apprenticeship. Will he survive the gruelling training to become a master tailor? Or will he, as Spijak’s daughter urges him to, escape?The Cutting of the Cloth, drawn so much from Hastings’s youthful experience as an apprentice tailor, has lain in a drawer. Now Two’s Company brings it rampaging on to the stage.

Set in the Paris apartment of James Joyce and his family, Michael Hasting’s new play takes place when a young student named Samuel Beckett arrives, and an unusual love begins. Michael Hastings is also the author of Tom and Viv (published by Oberon Books), which was about T.S. Eliot’s controversial relationship with his wife Vivienne.

It is Cambridge, 1915, and Tom, an awkward American graduate, meets Viv. Enchanted with each other, the couple are sucked into a whirlwind romance. But as Tom begins to become successful in the field of literature, Viv's volatility becomes a problem rather than a quirk. Their swift marriage turns into an impossible love story.