Max Hastings – The Cuban Missile Crisis Live on Stage

On 14 October 1962 the US and the USSR clashed when the Russian government moved nuclear warheads to the island of Cuba. The US responded to this perceived threat, and in a stand-off Nikita Khrushchev and President John F Kennedy engaged in a tense war of words and positioning which became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Live on stage in London, Max Hastings will send us back in time to those nail-biting days. Bringing together vivid personal narratives on the ground with the big picture, he will take us inside the minds of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers; offering an unforgettable account of a world on the verge of Armageddon.

The invasion of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers. To contend with today’s threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss of mutual annihilation. Only by fearing the worst can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.

Historian and Editor

Max Hastings is the author of thirty books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, bestsellers translated around the world. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, London and was knighted in 2002. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

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