After Dinner Speakers
Sir Max Hastings – Former Newspaper Editor, Broadcaster, Author, Military Historian and Keynote Speaker.
Sir Max Hastings was born in 1945 and educated at Charterhouse and Oxford. He became a foreign correspondent and reported from more than 60 countries and 11 wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, London, Max Hastings has won many awards for his books and his journalism.
Sir Max Hastings is the author of over twenty books. Among his best selling books, “Bomber Command” won ‘The Somerset Maugham Prize’ and both “Overlord” and “Battle for the Falklands” won ‘The Yorkshire Post Book of the Year’ Prize.
Sir Max spent most of his early years as a foreign correspondent, reporting from eleven conflicts, notably including Vietnam and the Falklands.
During the Falklands war he was a correspondent for The Standard. He cultivated contacts with senior officers and together with physical stamina, extreme competitiveness, earned himself a string of exclusive stories. This culminated in a solo march into Port Stanley as the Argentineans surrendered. He left the Parachute Battalion he had been accompanying at the edge of the islands’ tiny capital and walked on alone, making him the first member of the British task force to enter Port Stanley.
He has presented many TV documentaries, including the Channel 4 series ‘Winston’s War’
After 10 years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, in 1996 he was appointed to the editorship of the London Evening Standard, from which he stepped down in February 2002.
Sir Max Hastings regularly contributes to The Daily Mail and The Sunday Telegraph.
He was awarded a knighthood in June 2002.