War reporter, BBC correspondent, editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings is something of a British institution - and this account of his adventures across the war-torn globe fairly rattles and crackles along as it tracks his large and somewhat shambolic figure from Chicago's race riots to Belfast's sectarian street battles via Biafra, Angola, Israel and Cambodia. Hastings is not a man to hide his likes and dislikes under a bushel, and his forthrightness, whether he is praising the Israeli army or taking a swipe at lefty colleagues such as John Pilger, always makes for compelling reading. But though he repeatedly emphasises his essential cowardliness and inadequacy in the face of derring-do under fire, it is clear that when it comes to soldiering - particularly soldiering of the old-style, footsore, tramping through the jungle type - Hastings is a hopeless romantic. He is at his partisan best in the heartrending chapters devoted to the collapse of the Vietnam war and the fall of Saigon, at his abject worst in the chapters which form the book's "climax", in which he attempts to justify his role in the Falklands conflict, which won him, on the one hand, several awards, and on the other, the everlasting contempt of many of his fellow hacks. Even as he himself tells it, chock-full of elegant self-deprecation, it is an inglorious tale: he abandoned any pretence of journalistic objectivity, rode roughshod over his colleagues, camped out, chewed chocolate and indulged unashamedly in what strikes this reader as a sadly misguided Boys' Own fantasy.
