Andrew O’Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan is the LRB’s editor at large. He is the author of seven novels – Our Fathers, Personality, Be Near Me, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, The Illuminations, Mayflies and Caledonian Road – and four books of non-fiction: The Missing, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America, 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) and On Friendship.

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 Nelson, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, the end of British farming, Jonathan Franzen, hating football, Scotland’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.

Living the Life

Andrew O’Hagan, 6 October 2016

Being an agent isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle, and the people who are really good at it are having a wonderful life, though none of them is going to heaven. The agents at CAA sometimes got speeding tickets on the way to work, not because they were late, but because they couldn’t wait to get to the office. Every night there was a drink or a dinner or a screening or a premiere, and they earned millions of dollars a year. Agents live the whole thing 24 hours a day; their motto: ‘Shit Happens.’ And they put up with infinitely more shit than the average office worker, who lives in the expectation that nobody will ever ask them to risk their position, or justify it, or state an opinion.

Short Cuts: Ulysses v. O.J. Simpson

Andrew O’Hagan, 28 July 2016

People​ now talk about big drama serials the way they used to talk about classic novels. If there’s one you haven’t caught up with you feel embarrassed, and you might ask yourself, when the conversation swells and you chase your salad round and round, what you’ve been doing with your life. ‘Oh, I missed that’ is no longer an option, as box-sets and catch-up...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

Craig Wright seemed to get more and more frustrated. He both wanted fame and repudiated it, craving the recognition he felt was his due while claiming his only wish was to get back to his desk. ‘I have people love my secret identity and hate me,’ he wrote on 23 October 2011. ‘I have hundreds of papers. Satoshi has one. Nothing, just one bloody paper and I cannot associate myself with ME!’

I want my wings: The Last Tycoons

Andrew O’Hagan, 3 March 2016

Modern Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements. Jean Stein’s book deploys a wonderful grace in uncovering a monstrous reality – it tells brilliant stories and lets their accretion work its own magic.

From The Blog

After the Deluge

31 December 2015

The average mid-life crisis ends in a red sports car, but mine landed in a caravan. I bought it during a fearful rainstorm 18 months ago and moved my fishing rod in the following day. There are two bottles of whisky here and a pot of soup on the hob; there’s a jar of pencils, an old typewriter, and a nice edition of The Mill on the Floss, which contains the best written account of a British flood that presently exists. As I write, and look out at the Clyde Firth, I fear that George Eliot’s coagulated waters might be about to overtop Ailsa Craig, the craggy rock in the middle of the sea that in my childhood was called Paddy’s Milestone.

Podcasts & Videos

Podcast

Sisters Come Second

Colm Tóibín, Andrew O’Hagan and Malin Hay

18 April 2023

In his introduction to our twelfth LRB Collection, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and...

Podcast

Analogous Patisseries

Mary-Kay Wilmers and Andrew O’Hagan

23 February 2021

Mary-Kay Wilmers, who retired as editor of the LRB last month, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her career, first at Faber and Faber, then the Listener, then for 42 years at the London...

Video

The LRB at 40

Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Bennett, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, Yun Sheng and Nicholas Spice

11 October 2019

We look back at 40 years of the LRB in our anniversary event at Conway Hall.

Podcast

Hands-On History

Andrew O’Hagan, Linda Colley and R.W. Johnson

19 August 2011

Andrew O’Hagan chaired this discussion between Linda Colley, R.W. Johnson and Tom Devine about national histories and the ways they should, and should not, be taught.

Pieces about Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB

Most Sincerely, Folks: Andrew O’Hagan

Michael Wood, 5 June 2003

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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