Andrew O’Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan is the LRB’s editor at large. He is the author of seven novels – Our FathersPersonalityBe Near MeThe Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, The Illuminations, Mayflies and Caledonian Road – and three books of non-fiction: The MissingThe Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America and The Secret Life: Three True Stories (which contains his LRB pieces on Julian Assange, creating a fake identity online and the search for Satoshi Nakamoto).

His first piece for the LRB, a Diary about James Bulger’s murder and the cruelty of children to other children, appeared in 1993, when he was working as an editor at the paper (in 2010 he wrote about Jon Venables’s rearrest). He has written more than a hundred and fifty pieces for the LRB since then, on subjects including begging, the sinking of his grandfather’s ship, the murder of the Irish solicitor Rosemary NelsonMarilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, the end of British farmingJonathan Franzen, hating footballScotland’s sense of grievance, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions of 2004 and the Republican one of 2024, poetry anthologies, the 7/7 bombing outside the LRB’s old offices, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, what happens to our rubbish, a driving holiday with Seamus Heaney and the LRB’s first editor, Karl Miller, Jimmy Savile and the BBC, Norman Mailer, the Daily Mail, the Grenfell disaster, Robert Louis Stevenson in Bournemouth and in Edinburgh, old Soho, the New Romantics and Prince Harry.

On​ 6 December 2000, during a snowstorm, Joan Didion was sitting in the waiting room of an office in Manhattan reading a copy of National Geographic. She was lost in an article about polar bears and their cubs and regretted having to stop reading when her therapist called her into his room. Roger MacKinnon, who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York...

Diary: Whitney lives!

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 May 2025

On the eve​ of the first lockdown, I made my way to the Hammersmith Apollo to attend a performance by Whitney Houston. It was a chill, ominous night and the people outside the venue were wide-eyed and excited about their forthcoming encounter with the undead. I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and...

Ioncewitnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to...

There was​ lightning in the sky over Chicago, and I was waiting at the airport. An announcement echoed across the departure gate: there was going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on...

Push Me Pull You: Creating the Beckhams

Andrew O’Hagan, 18 July 2024

People​ who write unauthorised biographies often get authorised rebuttals. In 2004, when Kitty Kelley published The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, the disaster-prone House majority leader Tom DeLay wrote to her publisher, Doubleday, that she was in an ‘advanced stage of her pathological career’. He also claimed that Doubleday was in a state of ‘moral...

About a third of the way through his first book, The Missing, Andrew O’Hagan pauses over a perception he thinks his readers may find ‘a bit surprising’. It’s an intricate...

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