As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it. It was a small lift, just a box on a rope really. You could hear the churning of the wheel high above, and the whole thing creaked as it wound you up through the building.
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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.
‘The year I'm talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen’.
‘Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young.’
Kate Zambreno on Marguerite Duras.
‘I see a gull in a car park and they can see the place where it metabolised water into feathers, food into energy, oxygen into blood.’ Stephen Rutt on what isotopes can tell us about birds.
‘Ungraceful, the heart boinks: / drugged, suspended, spiderwebbed – ’
Four poems by Katie Farris.
‘Most of us these days are dead or on autopilot / As for the wolves – they thrive’
Two poems by Claudine Toutoungi.
‘It’s the year of “the human being”. The year of race-creed-color blindness. It’s 1963.’
