It is hard to convey the deep personal effect that someone’s journalistic writing has on you, least of all someone like Ian Jack (Obituary, 30 October) who appeared only occasionally, was almost a generation apart, and had an entirely different cultural profile.
Yet whenever his articles appeared, whatever they were about – and the topics were wide, varied and sometimes obscure to me – I would see his byline and a sunbeam would hit me. I would smile, shuffle into my chair a bit more and be absorbed by his depth of knowledge, his beautiful, fluid writing style and his unstinting generosity of spirit and kindness in everything he wrote about.
