The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.

Hastings was the first journalist to enter the liberated Port Stanley during the 1982 Falklands War. Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. In 2010 he received the Royal United Services Institute's Westminster Medal for his 'lifelong contribution to military literature' and the same year the Edgar Wallace Award from the London Press Club.

Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings FRSL FRHistS (born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist editor historian and author.