Academics
Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales by many writers, about men and women who have borne arms, reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings’s lifetime of studying war. It rings the changes through the centuries, between the heroic, tragic and comic; the famous and the humble. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome’s captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon’s marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton and the modern SAS. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female ‘abosi’ fighters of Dahomey and heroic ambulance drivers of World War I, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: though nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy. This is a book to inspire in turn fascination, excitement, horror, amazement, occasionally laughter. Max Hastings mingles respect for the courage of those who fight with compassion for those who become their victims, above all civilians, and especially in the twenty-first century, which some are already calling ‘the Post-Heroic Age’.
Max Hastings is the author of twenty-seven books, most of them about war. Born in London in 1945, he attended University College, Oxford before becoming a journalist. In 1967 he was a World Press Institute Fellow in the United States, then stayed to report the 1968 US election. Thereafter he worked as a reporter for BBC TV and British newspapers, covering eleven conflicts including Vietnam, the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the 1982 South Atlantic war. His first major book was BOMBER COMMAND, published in Britain and the US in 1979. He has since authored such works as VIETNAM, CATASTROPHE, ARMAGEDDON, RETRIBUTION, WINSTON'S WAR, THE KOREAN WAR AND INFERNO. Between 1986 and 2002 he served as editor-in-chief of the British Daily Telegraph, then editor of the London Evening Standard. He has won many awards both for his books and his journalism, including the 2012 $100,000 Pritzker Library prize for lifetime achievement, and the 2019 Bronze Arthur Ross medal of the US Council For Foreign Relations for VIETNAM. He lives in Berkshire, UK, with his wife Penny and has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry. Max says: 'I am lucky enough to have been able to earn my living doing the things I love most: travelling and hearing incredible stories from people all over the world, then writing about their experiences in war, when mankind is at both its best and worst'. Among the scariest moments of his career as a war correspondent, he cites following the embattled Israeli army on the Golan Heights in October 1973, and reporting the last weeks in Vietnam in 1975, before flying out of the US Embassy compound in its final evacuation.
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