Douglas Edward Macdonald Hastings (1909 – 4 October 1982) was a British journalist, author and war correspondent.
Macdonald Hastings was born in London, and educated at Stonyhurst College, a Roman Catholic Jesuit school in Lancashire. He became war correspondent for Picture Post during the Second World War, sending dispatches from north-west Europe. He married Anne Scott-James, distinguished columnist and later magazine editor (they later divorced), and was father of Sir Max Hastings, journalist and newspaper editor.
Hastings was an occasional contributor of fiction to Lilliput, the literary magazine, under the pseudonym of Lemuel Gulliver. He was editor of the Strand Magazine between 1946 and 1950, after which he was recruited by Rev Marcus Morris to write for a new boys' comic, The Eagle. He joined in 1951, and filed reports from far-flung parts of the world under the title of Eagle Special Correspondent. He was also co-founder and editor of the fortnightly Country Fair magazine.
He also wrote around thirty books, on subjects such as game shooting, was author of a series of detective novels and appeared on television as a weekly correspondent on the BBC programme Tonight in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
He died at his home in Basingstoke, Hampshire in 1982.
Famous quotes containing the word hastings:
“Janie works hard, of course, and she’s a good wife and mother, but do you know she’s never once made a gingerbread house with her children?”
—Mildred Hastings (b. 1924)