Ian Jack worked on the Scottish Daily Express and the Sunday Times, edited the Independent on Sunday and Granta, and was a columnist on the Guardian. His pieces were collected in Before the Oil Ran Out, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain and Mofussil Junction: Indian Encounters 1977-2011. He was working on a book about the Clyde at the time of his death in 2022, and his last piece for the LRB was on the decline of shipbuilding on the river and the CalMac ferry debacle that was in part a result of this.
The item which seems set to stay longest with me from Ian Jack’s alert and precisely-written record of British life in the Seventies and Eighties comes from the opening memoir of his...
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