‘Strangely, anti-British remarks made me feel patriotic, though I only felt patriotic when I was away from England.’
The man had heard that I was interested in talking about his country, Pakistan, and that this was my first visit. He kindly kept trying to take me aside to talk. But I was already being talked at.
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‘Ian was a gifted journalist and editor of immense common sense, and had an insatiable curiosity about the world around him. We will miss him.’
Editor of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, remembers Ian Jack.
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
Ian Jack on the slag heaps of Glasgow, and the aristocratic lives built on them.
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
Ian Jack in 1997 on the death of Diana.
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
Ian Jack recalls the missing buildings of his hometown, Farnworth.
‘Outside wars and nuclear accidents, it is hard to think of any technological failure which has had such lasting and widespread effects.’
Ian Jack on the Hatfield train crash, from Granta 73.
‘My response to the music had reminded me that concealed inside myself was a more excitable and open self raring to get out.’
‘The warmest companion with the coldest vision of where Humanity might head.’
‘If you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse‘.
‘I’d have dumped her if it wouldn’t have caused more problems than it solved.’
