“... the perennial murmur swelling to a growl – is currently in crisis (again). Earlier this year, Andrew Marr certified it dead. (He was announcing the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction at the time. His verdict may prove to be no less premature than Johnson’s pronouncement on Sterne: ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not ...”

“... anthology of LRB pieces, for which Frank wrote a short introduction. In the course of it he said: Andrew O’Hagan, an echt LRB writer, displays all the best qualities of this kind of journalism: while writing about Scottish nationalism he has a go at a senior contributor, Neal Ascherson, along the way. In the same spirit Stefan Collini takes a ...”

“... rusty old gates open as long as they can. In a recent article for the New York Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan argued that ‘the population of Scotland will never get a better deal than the one the Union has afforded them for over three hundred years.’ Possibly, and Kidd’s description of the old deal is a very telling one. But one reason for his ...”

“... poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin ...”

“... what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead’, as Andrew O’Hagan wrote in a different context, seem ideally suited to a writer like Ondaatje, who is happy to operate on the borders of realism. The meticulous detail doesn’t compensate for shortcomings in the more basic elements of a ...”

“... delay ferment memory and old jottings with an element of invention – or at least imagination. As Andrew O’Hagan wrote (in the LRB of 25 September 2008), ‘his fictional powers only reached full flourish when he wasn’t writing novels.’ Take Naples ’44, which many readers (including me) think was his masterpiece. An account of his service as an ...”

“... Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up ...”

“... Gorbals Diehards took on the Bolsheviks in Huntingtower, crackhead gangs are fighting it out. Andrew O’Hagan’s threnody for Scots socialism, Our Fathers, has Hugh Bawn making his way to his dying grandfather’s Ayrshire flat through a mob of giggling, doped kids. O’Hagan himself has talked of the more ...”