, who had worked in linen mills. When Jack was seven, his father's work took the family to Fife. After Dunfermline High School, he trained on the Glasgow Herald before becoming a reporter on the Cambuslang Advertiser and the East Kilbride News. He spent four years on the Scottish Daily Express, and then 16 (1970-1986) on The Sunday Times, where his jobs included chief news sub-editor, editor of the Look features section, commissioning editor on the magazine, editor of the Atticus gossip column, and magazine writer. When the paper shut down for a year in the late 1970s, the consequence of an industrial dispute, Jack took himself off to India to write a book, remaining there for a time as a correspondent. By 1986, the Evans era had given way to that of Andrew Neil, to which Jack was less attuned. The move to Wapping and the bitter industrial strife that resulted troubled him deeply and he resolved that it was time to move on. Jack was one of The Sunday Times's shining emblems, and there were painful exchanges with Neil, who in his memoir wrote that Jack's departure 'provoked the most serious internal crisis of my editorship'. One of Jack's protegées in his Look section days had been a young Tina Brown, who would go on to become the editor of The New Yorker magazine (and marry Harold Evans). In the late 1980s, Brown was editing Vanity Fair in New York and she now returned the favour by hiring Jack as a writer. He liked that the brevity of his name lent itself to use on the masthead. Jack was rare in his mastery of both writing skills and editing skills, and his next move was back inside, the opportunity provided by the launch of The Independent on Sunday in 1990. He was founding editor of the ground-breaking Sunday Review supplement, and by 1991 had become the paper's editor, a position he held for four years. 'He could do absolutely everyth){kind=link}
He had an intense feeling for the past, and was, said a former colleague, ‘an excellent reporter, ferreting researcher and beautiful writer’
Ian Jack, who has died aged 77, was one of the most outstanding journalists of his generation. As a reporter, he was responsible for pieces that went unusually deep into a subject and stayed unusually long in the reader’s mind. As an editor, he took the helm of both The Independent on Sunday newspaper and the literary magazine Granta, nurturing writers who would go on to eminence themselves.
Jack reached the top level of what used to be called “the higher journalism” without ever having been to university. Largely brought up on the east coast of Scotland, he started out on local newspapers before, in the 1970s, becoming part of the team at The Sunday Times who worked under its fabled editor (and another non-graduate) Harold Evans.
Jack had an intense feel for the past but it was neither nostalgic nor conservative. Ships and trains and the engineering stories behind them were a passionate interest. So too was India, from where he reported extensively. His pieces, which in later life appeared mostly in The Guardian and the London Review of Books, were always rooted in people’s everyday experiences, and always expressive of Jack’s own decency.
Questions around civic values seemed to lie at the heart of everything Jack wrote about. He mourned the decline in those values but his aim was to understand the process rather than to condemn it.