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.

Letter
Andrew O’Hagan writes: I am a great admirer of Jean Strouse’s writing on Alice James, and there is no doubt that Alice was speaking about her doctors in the remarks quoted. However, it seems to me that her remarks about those ‘great men’ carry an inference about great men generally, not excluding those in her own fam­ily. That notion, to my mind, is supported by Leon Edel’s view that...
Letter

The Tower

7 June 2018

Andrew O’Hagan writes: I understand Melanie Coles’s position. In a story of some 60,000 words, she appears only for a few sentences, and she wants to take them back, and right herself with the Grenfell community. It doesn’t matter that the sentences are benign, that they show her to have been a caring teacher, and that she gave us that material willingly. She now wants to censor it, and censure...
Letter
David Thomson has high standards in film stars and he imposes rather firm rules about how they ought to twinkle, but he isn’t being fair to Marilyn Monroe (Letters, 24 May). The actress won’t be confused anytime soon with Abraham Lincoln or Abbie Hoffman, but in her own way she changed the situation, pre-1960s, by making the personal feel like something more political. Twentieth Century-Fox wanted...
Letter

To the Malibu Hills

11 September 2003

I admire Clancy Sigal’s attempt to be fairer to John Ford on the Red-baiting front than I was (Letters, 9 October), but surely he knows that artists are likely to be more than one thing. Ford may have distinguished himself by telling Cecil B. DeMille to shut his trap, but he was not always so clear when it came to the question of Communists in Hollywood.‘While he was fighting the blacklist at the...

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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