Quotes from Max Hastings

I'm a passionate monarchist.

A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly.

Lots of us when we're children believe 'oh well, if the world knew us as we really are, they'd know what wonderful, clever, brilliant, charming people we really are.'

I'm a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I'm sort of an aggressive wet liberal.

There was no doubt that in the early and mid-eighties that many of us in broadsheet newspapers felt that we still had a responsibility to try to protect the Royal Family or if you like protect the Monarchy from the assaults of the media.

People who get on at school are the ones who play by the rules, and no one's going to get far in later life playing by the system.

When I am fishing, I think quite a lot about the fish, but I also think about the book I'm writing.

It was always inevitable that if you get serious trouble in any family then everybody's inclined to look at the head of that family and see if they see any cause or reason to associate it with the head of the, head of the family, why it should be.

I would have been a disastrous soldier.

As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.

I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.

We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous.

I've always found women more loyal, more disciplined, less neurotic, more hardworking. I just think they're perfect colleagues. Whereas, God knows, I've dealt with plenty of neurotic men.

total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders—more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war.

At Arnhem, the British fielded too many gentlemen and not enough players.

Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: 'Shit, man, he's the only boy we got out there.

Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.

Diem regarded the Americans as 'great big children – well-intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race'.

The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman's presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating 'Reds' in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed.

Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma.

It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.

France's Gen. Alphonse Juin was the only Allied commander to emerge from the mountain campaigns with an enhanced reputation: a marshal who had voluntarily dropped a rank to fight in Italy, Juin was far better fitted to direct operations than either Alexander or Clark.

Allied powers provided for their own peoples levels of nourishment which they denied to others, including societies notionally under their protection.

To this day, mass graves of Stalin's victims continue to be uncovered in eastern Poland. As