Putting a paper to rights

Max Hastings (£20, Macmillan)

In May 1985, Lord Hartwell, the shy, Mini-driving owner of the Telegraph met Conrad Black and agreed to sell him a minority share in his newspapers. Afterwards, a relieved Hartwell was heard to mutter: "Good man, Conrad Ritblat." Confident he had saved his company, Hartwell wrote an upbeat message to readers. The groggy typography encapsulated the problems that were losing the Telegraph £1 million and 10,000 readers a month: "I believe we have taken the right steps to give our newspaper a godo (sic) future."

Max Hastings was that "godo future", of which Editor is his account.

Hastings then was a 39-year-old freelance whom Andrew Knight, the broker of the Black deal, had run to earth in Middle England, a Tolkien-like region inhabited by torrid "flat-earthers" with picturesque ideas about capital punishment and South Africa.

Surrounded by chickens, dogs and children, Hastings bore a superficial resemblance less to Strider than to William Boot. For many, his appointment as the Telegraph's editor was a case of mistaken identity.

When he heard the news, Lord Hartwell "exploded", one journalist had to lie down, while the wife of another posted Hastings several packages of excrement. In fact, Knight's improbable choice was inspired. Readers of Going to the Wars will know what a peerless and literate reporter Hastings is. But editing also was in his blood. His grandfather edited the Bystander, his father the Strand magazine, his mother Harper's Bazaar. "The view onto Fleet Street was my heritage," he says.

Thus, in February 1986, a tall, noisy figure trampled through the Telegraph building to the glum alarm of its staff, many in their seventies. The same height as Osama bin Laden ("a gangly 6ft 5ins") and sweeping a Hitlerian lock of hair from his spectacles, Hastings, who had never run anything more taxing than a pheasant shoot, was about to transform "a vast, ailing pachyderm" into a modern broadsheet.

I was privileged to be one of his "young Turks" (hired, I suspect, because of a BBC trilogy I'd made on Evelyn Waugh). Editor brings back the exhilarating experience. I doubt any book captures so well the romance and thrill of running a great newspaper.

Hastings's critics complained that he lacked an embracing political vision, but this is what made him an unparalleled editor. Meritocratic, and believing that predictability is the enemy of good journalism, his doctrine was to inject "energy, surprise and laughter", and to a large extent he succeeded. By 1989, a revolutionised Telegraph was making profits of £40 million.

There were failures, too. One of the book's virtues is that it doesn't shrink from detailing these: notably "the aborted fiasco" of the Sunday Telegraph merger, and the author's inability, in the end, to curb Black's editorial interference.

It's a pity Hastings didn't keep diaries, but he has kept his correspondence. His often exasperated exchanges with the proprietor set the stage for the principal drama.

Editor draws the curtain on two Maxes. One is the trigger-happy heretic who views journalism as a spectator sport and knows that "all newspaper editors are swiftly and justly forgotten".