Selina Hastings

Acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings gives an illustrated and deeply personal talk about the life of her father, Jack Hastings, an artist, politician, and archetypal English eccentric who escaped his rigidly upper class life when he eloped with a penniless Italian. The couple fled to Australia where Jack took a job as a jackaroo. Jack, a talented artist, also travelled to the US and Mexico where he became a pupil and disciple of Diego Rivera. He was the first communist member of the House of Lords and a member of Attlee’s post-war government. Hastings’s research has uncovered a secret, and destroyed, autobiography that almost certainly covered an affair with Edwina Mountbatten.

Hastings is a former literary editor of the Telegraph and has published highly acclaimed biographies, including of Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Rosamund Lehmann and Nancy Mitford.

Supported by Ian and Carol Sellars.