SWINDON FESTIVAL OF LITERATURE - REVIEW: MAX Hastings quite cheerfully admits he wouldn't want to be stuck on a desert island with a warrior.

To Hastings, the noted military historian and former editor of the Daily Telegraph, warriors are there for bravery and derring-do but you certainly don't want them leading men, or pretending to be the brains of any martial outfit.

But he's fascinated by those who walk the line between courage and madness.

Appropriately, Hastings has seen a number of battles himself as a war correspondent. He was the first man to re-enter Port Stanley after going to the Falkland Islands with the paras in 1982, and there is a lot of old (public) school chutzpah about the man when he quotes Winston Churchill's enthusiastic accounts of the Boer War.

However, speaking at the Arts Centre last night, it's obvious he knows that times, culture and society have changed. Promoting his book Warriors, which profiles 15 examples of the fighting breed, he explains we've now become a society detached from war (although that's no bad thing).

With the 60th anniversary of VE Day this weekend, it's a timely point a major war has now been the experience only of grandparents, if not great-grandparents and so our response to expert killers is different to the public's even 50 years ago.

He also freely admits his choice of warriors is "whimsical", and the portraits are there to entertain rather than to sit alongside serious, academic study. But he knows his stuff, and also what's required from a "hero" he won't let the title be bestowed on a footballer, for instance. Hastings is here for the masculine, reckless warrior, who, as his name suggests, is happiest in war.

As we see the fall-out of the Iraq war, and the bizarre threat of litigation against the Government by dead soldiers' bereaved families, Max Hastings' ability to see the historical perspective of war isn't just interesting it might just be necessary.

By Tom Morton