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.

Cartwheels over Broken Glass: worshipping Morrissey

Andrew O’Hagan, 4 March 2004

“I first clapped eyes on Morrissey on 22 September 1985. It was a cold night on the West Coast of Scotland at the Magnum Leisure Centre in Irvine, and The Smiths were brewing up a humongous storm on the converted badminton courts. The audience contained a fair number of what in that part of the world are called ‘neds’ – razor-cropped hooligans with a happy average of one O-grade in woodwork between them – and I found myself surprised to see these ruffians tearing at their Fred Perry shirts before climbing up the amplifiers to drape themselves around Morrissey’s neck, while the singer went about his business with a giant bunch of gladioli, swinging them round his head and narrowing his eyes like Edith Sitwell.”

Watching Me Watching Them Watching You: Surveillance

Andrew O’Hagan, 9 October 2003

I spent the first of my teenage years living in the grounds of an approved school, a place that faced onto a ruined castle said to have given a night’s shelter to Mary Queen of Scots. The escaping Queen was never there at all, but people preferred to think she had never left: every castle in Scotland seeks to have its part in Mary’s story, and her eyes were felt to burn through the...

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...

You Have A Mother Don’t You? Cowboy Simplicities

Andrew O’Hagan, 11 September 2003

It’s odd to think that Abraham Lincoln was killed by an actor, because most of the memorable American Presidents to follow him were actors in their blood. Eisenhower excelled in the part of the sturdy veteran who’d come home to tidy the porch, and Nixon was every part in The Godfather rolled into one. But it took Ronald Reagan to drive the matter past the point of absurdity:...

Short Cuts: Slayer Slang and Bling Bling

Andrew O’Hagan, 21 August 2003

We are told that the average household’s electricity usage goes up 100 per cent during the summer holidays, the result not of air-conditioning but of an almost total aversion among today’s nippers to the bee-loud glade, in fact to the great outdoors in general, which appears to be a place rather badly equipped to compete with video games called things like ‘Wasp Attack...

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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