The autobiography of Britain's most outstanding military historian, Max Hastings.The son of high-flying journalists Anne Scott-James and Macdonald Hastings, Max Hastings' family is one with a great literary heritage. Authors, journalists and reporters fill the family tree and many of them recorded their experiences in writing. By age seventeen, Max had read almost all the forty-odd books that those Hastings before him had published.In 1986, when he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Max dodged the tricky questions about parental relations. Yet, years later, when his mother featured on the same programme, she was far less inhibited. To the audience's delight and to her son's toe-curling embarrassment, she told of old family quarrels, and Max's frightful childhood behaviour. For weeks afterwards, he was constantly asked 'did you really shoot the television?'In this candid, funny and touching autobiography, Max Hastings reveals, for the first time, the realities of growing up in the Scott-James-Hastings household. Inclining to his mother's view that 'all families are dysfunctional', he looks back at the colourful history of his family; his great-grandfather Hugh, the first family member to hit Fleet Street, grandfather Basil, the first to make his living from the pen and who remained at 5"7 whilst the rest of his siblings reached over 6-foot, and his beloved great- uncle Lewis who ran away to South Africa. And, of course, his parents, the beautiful and witty Anne and the celebrated war correspondent, Macdonald.