23 APRIL 2005, Page 23

Overdue loan

From Hugh Candler

Sir: I read with interest Sam Leith’s review of Max Hastings’s Warriors (Books, 9 April) and in particular the acknowledgment by Max that as a schoolboy he ‘thrilled’ to a 1920s anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. Could this be the same book that I lent Max when we were at prep school together in about 1957? He’d remember me as Candler Mi.

Could it also be the same book that inspired his father, the Eagle Special Investigator author Macdonald Hastings, to write a series of articles on heroes of the first world war?

If so, I would like to have my book back. Hugh Candler Abergavenny, Monmouthshire