Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. A castaway this week has been described by fellow toilers in Fleet Street as a genuine young eccentric.

He's also been called the wildest man ever to edit the Daily Telegraph.

He became well known to the general public during the Falklands War when his dispatchers made him a household name.

Moreover, the legend was enhanced when he walked into Port Stanley ahead of the British troops. He is also a military historian,

lately commissioned to write the Oxford history of the Second World War,

and he won the Somerset morn prize for non-fiction

with his book, Bomber Command.

He is the editor of the Deli Telegraph, Max Hastings.

Max, given your pedigree, your father, McDonald Hastings, your mother and Scott James,

too redoubtable journalists, was a much doubt that you would not become a journalist?

I suppose not, obviously most of us are tremendously conditioned by the environment in which we grow up

and I always loved the business of newspapers and the business of television and I grew up listening

to the gossip of those trades and it seemed to me the most romantic and exciting business on earth.

And I suppose it's very unusual. Some people don't get on with their parents at all, but I suppose

my father and I agreed about almost everything and I loved all the things that he loved and I

wanted to do all the things that he did from a very early age.

So there was no one moment in time when it blindingly came to you that you wanted to be a journalist.

You've always wanted to be that all your life.

I think it simply seemed as I watched my father going off on assignments all over the world

and I watched his stuff appearing in the papers and his pieces appearing on television that I just

...