Spoilt, spiteful, tantrum-prone, awkward and unpopular: that's how a young Max Hastings comes across in this memoir focusing on several generations of his fabulously successful family, all of whom seem to have been writers, Indiana Jones-style adventurers or both.

Whether or not he's exaggerating, it's reassuring to think that the knighted former Telegraph editor and author of two dozen books gets down on himself, too, and spent his adolescence doing stupid things such as firing a pistol at his parents' TV while Perry Mason was on.

If only all autobiographies were this brutally honest. Although Hastings spends much of this one disobeying his father's written command not to boast about the fact that "you spring from a brilliant and distinguished family from both sides", he's not afraid to document failures either. There's a reason he waited until both his parents were dead to put the whole thing on paper.

He blames his mother for inflicting "savage emotional wounds" and paints his father as something of a bigot. They were both devoted to their careers, and Max bitterly remembers holidays with the nanny, being packed off to a boarding school he hated as a young boy, and barely any parental affection.

There was also a dauntingly high bar for success. Hastings's grandfathers were both writers who mixed with literary celebs and his great-uncle Lewis "cut a swath" through colonial Africa, fighting in various wars. Both parents edited prestigious magazines, wrote stacks of books and did things like voluntarily marooning themselves on desert islands.

For those unmoved by Hastings's soul-searching, the appeal of the book will be in its portrait of upper-middle-class life as it evolved, or failed to evolve, over a century. As a young man in the 1960s, Hastings would do his grocery shopping at Harrods and go on shooting holidays in Highland lodges: an anachronistic lifestyle he couldn't afford.

The story stops around this point, with the author (now 65 and, unusually, a contributor to both the Guardian and Daily Mail) still a rookie reporter, and so we don't hear about his two marriages or the suicide of his eldest son in 1999. To get the scoop on Hastings's own family, we'll have to wait until the next generation sets down their experiences in print, although it's unlikely they'll manage to be as hard on Max as he is on himself.