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“... hit a lung and the heart, causing massive internal bleeding. He had no chance of survival. Captain Andrew Cox dispatched a helicopter to pick up the injured man and bring him back to base. The helicopter carried him to camp Abu Naji where he was ventilated, but his pupils became fixed and at 00.50 hrs on 2 May 2005, surrounded by medical officers, Guardsman ...”

“... This last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex ...”

“... to me and it was as if he was dropping a sugar lump into my tea. He typed the words, ‘Here I am, Andrew,’ and rested his fingers. ‘This gives us that little block there,’ he said, before verifying the signature. He looked sheepish and resigned in his blue checked shirt. ‘Welcome to the bit I was hoping to bury,’ he said. He leaned back and I ...”

“... at the culture of Kensington and Chelsea Council, and where it came from.AudioYou can listen to Andrew O’Hagan’s piece in full in this audio version provided by Audm.Section I: The FireSection II: The BuildingSection III: The AftermathSection IV: The NarrativeSection V: Whose Fault?Section VI: The RebellionSection VII: The FactsAudm is a ...”

“... immediately there was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads seemed to be everywhere in British films of the 1960s, grunting and sweating their way through the class system, using sex as a narrow and repressed form of guerrilla warfare. We are often ...”

“... and that was Karl to me: the funniest man I ever knew, a perpetual friend, a Scotland of the mind....”

“... About a third of the way through his first book, The Missing, Andrew O’Hagan pauses over a perception he thinks his readers may find ‘a bit surprising’. It’s an intricate moment, since he thinks we are going to be surprised at the surprise he is describing. He is telling us that people who moved from Glasgow to the Scottish New Towns springing up in the 1960s hadn’t expected to take so much of the old city with them: ‘the older habits, the darker tints ...”

“... a limited work, cartoonish, narrow, raucous, too often mistaking noise for vividness. On the back, Andrew O’Hagan rightly characterises its effect as ‘like the Osbournes invited the Simpsons round for a root beer, and Don DeLillo dropped by to help them write a new song for Eminem,’ without telling us why that particular party would be enjoyable or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”