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“... The​ most unexpected building in Port Glasgow is a castle – Newark Castle, inherited in the 17th century by the Maxwell family, who turned it from an austere tower house into what the guidebook calls a Renaissance mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour ...”

“... 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 father, which supplies a deeper soil, or subsoil, to the son’s coverage of more recent matters for the Sunday Times and (since Wapping) the Observer: Few of his workplaces survive ...”

“... for Ian Jack Lying in bed in the dark without heating. December 3rd and feeling warm, almost too warm, I hear the window give that rattle-burp it only ever does when the wind is fierce outside. Black raindrops flame on the glass. Light from across the back gardens, one lone yellow oblong, someone up early on a winter morning ...”

“... programme tried to get a dispute going between Philip Hensher (37), one of the chosen writers, and Ian Jack (57), the editor of Granta and chair of the judges, after Hensher said he thought it was silly and arbitrary that novelists had to be under 40 to be considered, and that it should be more important that they’re new than that they’re young. ...”

“... what had possessed me to move. The last books pages I’d worked on at the Observer lay beside me (Ian Hamilton and Ted Hughes on the life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary ...”

“... a public that learned to be more enchanted by his insolence than pleased by his ingratiation. Ian Jack, in the last chapter of his book The Poet and his Audience, shows in detail the remarkable symbiosis between Yeats’s conquest of his audience and his conquest of himself. Of all the poets he surveys – Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley and Tennyson ...”

“... who is sometimes prepared to find fault (assuming this is done with a modicum of intelligence). Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, writing in the Guardian last year, came up with the following paradox: ‘Nobody who has struggled in front of a screen or paper for three years deserves a pasting written in half a day by a 23-year-old, though the pasting ...”

“... They are combative on this point, and so united that they frequently refer to themselves as ‘Jack&Ian’. To this winsome dyad the notion of astrobiology is limiting in that it stands for astronomy as seen from Earth plus Earth-style biology, so that its thinking is governed by anthropic concerns such as the search for ...”

“... platter, the dispute may prove hard to resolve. Wednesday is greatly enlivened by the presence of Ian Jack, who is one of the best journalists left on the paper. Ian voted to go to Wapping, went straight there, but subsequently, driven by journalistic curiosity, spent more of the week in Gray’s Inn Road than most of ...”

“... odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’) Responding to Marr’s comments, Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, suggested that it would be more accurate to say there was a ‘lull’. Since, then, Robert McCrum, the literary editor of the Observer, has discussed the question more than once in his column, ‘The World of Books’. And in ...”

“... The results have their own sort of fascination. Without being invidious, it must be said that Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler are making a collection as sumptuous as Aladdin’s cave, wonderfully easy to read, and with introductions as absorbing as the poems and plays have now become. There is even an appendix printing on opposite pages two versions of a ...”

“... unmediated small town settings; and turning to the past, either historical or familial’ – what Ian Jack calls the ‘Norman Rockwellisation of the novel’. With most of America living in cities or densely populated suburbs, the turn to small towns in so much recent fiction is striking. What happened to the suburban novel of a generation ago? John ...”

“... people I admired, and mistaken for another Indian contributor, the late Raj Chandavarkar, by Ian Jack. I ate canapés, searched for something to say to Frank Kermode, and had a glass of red wine. I generally feel neither one way nor another about drinking, but my listlessness about consuming alcohol offends only Indian acquaintances, not Western ...”

“... the myths and rituals of the British state, but a blasé indifference to the impact of policy. As Ian Jack pointed out in these pages last year (15 June 2017), the expat perspective seems to play an important role in the psychology of Brexit. Hannan and Carswell both had expatriate childhoods. Astute observers, such as the writer Gary Younge, have argued ...”

“... expects that the reader should see him. And here we are very much in the dark: not for nothing has Ian Jack, its meticulous editor, noted that ‘Wuthering Heights is one of the most enigmatic of English novels.’ Much depends on how Emily Brontë imagined her hero, as well as very skilfully creating him, and covering her authorial tracks. I would say ...”