‘He played it as loud as he could, as though he hoped the music would remind the hay in the barn above of green grass and blue cornflowers.’
Will you play at my wedding? Philippe the cheese-maker asked him. Philippe was thirty-four. People had been saying he would never get married.
When is it?
Saturday next.
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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.
‘To create is to let take over something which did not exist before and is therefore new.’
‘Use these photos as means of transport. Ride on them. No passes needed. Go close. Imprudently close. They leave every minute.’
‘The image impressed me when I set eyes upon it for the first time. It was as if it were already familiar, as if, as a child, I had already seen the same man framed in a doorway.’
‘If I'm not transferred to the mines, I'll hold out, and you must go on thinking of me as dead: you will be closer, my heart, to the reality.’
‘When I was growing up in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the south-east coast of India, I would go with my family each Sunday to the beach.‘
