Ian Jack, who has died at the age of 77, was one of the great British journalists of his generation. “No journalist had a deeper sense of history than Ian Jack,” his friend Donald Macintyre wrote on Saturday. “It’s hard to think of anyone in our trade who was better read or had deeper intellectual interests and passions.”
You could start almost anywhere among his remarkable body of work and feel certain of pleasure and enlightenment – but here are six recommendations from his colleagues.
‘His work is infused with the elegiac’
Ian Jack brought to his writing a degree of craft – and graft – that was, in its way, the equal of the master shipbuilders he so admired. What is most apparent, though, as in the shipyards themselves, is not so much the skill on display as the atmosphere all around. His work is infused with the elegiac. He was often described as nostalgic, but it’s more like homesickness for the past, as if he was born just too late and ached with that knowledge. This column on his father’s bookcase is a fine example of his technique, moving, through the accumulation of small details, from the particular and personal to a vast social and historical sweep. We are fortunate to have inherited Ian’s words. We shall miss his curious mind. Peter Ross, freelance journalist and author
‘A short masterpiece about national identity’
I’ve never stopped thinking about this article, written by Ian in 2016. It is a short masterpiece about national identity, and how the then-recent vote for Brexit had changed how he felt about his Britishness and his Scottishness. Its emotional power is heightened by a touching and unexpected anecdote about his family’s relationship with a German prisoner of war he never met. Ian’s sense of bitter betrayal at the end of the piece makes you shiver, with a sense of dread. Katharine Viner, editor, the Guardian
‘What is sometimes overlooked is what a brilliant reporter and researcher he was’
Everyone who has read Ian Jack knows what a brilliant writer he was, his gift for weaving together past and present. What is sometimes overlooked is what a brilliant reporter and researcher he was. In 2016, he wrote about Trident for the long read. Like everything Ian wrote, the piece is a deft synthesis of history, memoir and analysis. But in the course of writing it, Ian also seemed to have quietly acquired a PhD-level knowledge of nuclear technology and military theory. The piece exemplifies one of his key beliefs: that “writing, if it can do nothing else, should at least tell the reader something he didn’t know before.” David Wolf, editor, the Guardian long read
‘Restlessly curious’
Ian Jack and I shared a love of Arnold Bennett, the great early 20th century novelist and journalist of the Potteries. Rereading this column, I realise it says as much about Ian as it does about Bennett: both were restlessly curious, brilliant autodidacts, uprooted from but always shaped by the working-class locale in which they’d grown up. Ian loved Bennett’s story The Death of Simon Fuge. Take his advice and read it. Charlotte Higgins, chief culture writer, the Guardian
‘Ian started where he often did, close to home’
Ian Jack wrote for the London Review of Books on housing and ships, Scotland and Brexit, model railways and newspaper men. Sometimes his interests combined: just last month we published a remarkable 17,000-word piece by Ian on the CalMac ferry fiasco, a piece no one else could have written. One of my favourite of his pieces came out in May 2019. The book under review was on the subject of public land and its appropriation, but Ian started where he often did, close to home, on a ‘hilly little peninsula that juts south into the Firth of Forth’. Alice Spawls, co-editor, the London Review of Books
‘A paragon as a reporter and an editor’
Most journalists secretly feel they’re only good as their last story, so I’m going to choose Ian’s final piece, a column for the Guardian published on the Saturday before his death. He grew up in the old newspaper world of hot metal and proper deadlines, acquiring the skills that would make him such a paragon as a reporter and an editor. His reflection on the BBC’s centenary contains many of the elements that made him so distinctive: wisdom, historical perspective, clarity of prose and a late-maturing gift for using his own family background to add depth and colour to a story, something very few can manage. Richard Williams, former chief sportswriter, the Guardian
