Max Hastings quotes:

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.

Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel you become a royal reporter.

I would have been a disastrous soldier.

It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.

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

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.'

The only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges.

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

You cannot write down how people are good; you just know it, and cannot get away from it.