Digital List Price: | $17.99 |
Kindle Price: | $0.50 Save $17.49 (97%) |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
The Atlantic Ocean: Reports from Britain and America First Edition, Kindle Edition
For more than two decades, Andrew O’Hagan has been publishing celebrated essays on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean highlights the best of his clear-eyed, brilliant work, including his first published essay, a reminiscence of his working-class Scottish upbringing; an extraordinary piece about the lives of two soldiers, one English, one American, both of whom died in Iraq on May 2, 2005; and a piercing examination of the life of William Styron.
O’Hagan’s subjects range from the rise of the tabloids to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from the trajectory of the Beatles to the impossibility of not fancying Marilyn Monroe—in essays that are “stupendously unflinching, bursting with possibility” (Booklist, starred review).
“A brilliant essayist, [O’Hagan] constructs sentences that pierce like pinpricks.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
- ISBN-13978-0151013784
- EditionFirst
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJanuary 22, 2013
- LanguageEnglish
- File size3397 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Review
--Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Stupendously unflinching, bursting with possibility"---Booklist (starred)
From the Back Cover
For more than two decades, Andrew O’Hagan has been publishing celebrated essays on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean highlights the best of his clear-eyed, brilliant work, including his first published essay, a reminiscence of his working-class Scottish upbringing; an extraordinary piece about the lives of two soldiers, one English, one American, both of whom died in Iraq on May 2, 2005; and a piercing examination of the life of William Styron. O’Hagan’s subjects range from the rise of the tabloids to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from the trajectory of the Beatles to the impossibility of not fancying Marilyn Monroe.
The Atlantic Ocean — an engrossing and important collection.
Andrew O’Hagan’s novels have been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. He lives in London.
About the Author
ANDREW O'HAGAN was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His previous novels have been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Killing of James Bulger
The abduction and murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy from Liverpool, has caused unprecedented grief and anger. Hours before the two ten-year-old boys accused of the crime arrived at South Sefton Magistrates’ Court, a large, baying crowd had formed outside. As a pair of blue vans drew up, the crowd surged forward, bawling and screaming. A number of men tried to reach the vehicles, to get at the youths inside, and scuffles spilled onto the road. Some leapt over crash barriers and burst through police cordons, lobbing rocks and banging on the sides of the vans. Many in the crowd—sick with condemnation—howled and spat and wept.
Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke has promised measures to deal with “nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders.” Those two little offenders—if they were the offenders, the childish child murderers from Walton—were caught on camera twice. First on the security camera at the shopping precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill as they dragged James past—the child clearly in some distress.
Watching those boys on camera brought into my head a flurry of pictures from my own boyhood. At that age, we were brimming with nastiness. I grew up in the last of Scotland’s new-town developments. There were lots of children, lots of dogs and lots of building sites. Torture among our kind was fairly commonplace. I remember two furious old teachers driving me and my six-year-old girlfriend, Heather Watt, home early one morning. In recent weeks we had been walking the mile to school in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as “our boy.” We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with diggers going and “workies” taking little notice of us, though from time to time they’d bring over empty lemonade bottles which we could exchange for money or sweets at the chip shop. We must have looked innocent enough, holding hands, Heather and I, walking the younger boy to school.
Over time, we started to hit the boy hard. Our way to the school was dotted with new trees, freshly planted and bound to supporting stalks with rubber belts. We got into the habit of removing belts every day: we began to punish David with them whenever we thought he’d “been bad.” Just a few hits at first on top of his shorts, not so’s you’d notice. It got worse, though, and on the last morning, when we were caught by the two old lady teachers, we were beating his bare legs with the coiled-up straps. Though we’d set out on time that morning, we were late, having spent the best part of half an hour on top of an out-of-the-way railway bridge practically skinning the screaming boy’s legs.
That incident caused a scandal in our square. My mother was employed as a cleaner in another local primary school with David’s mother, and—although I remember crying and being confused and not quite knowing what we’d done wrong—I could see that we’d caused a lot of embarrassment. Up until the age of ten, I’d both taken part in and witnessed many such incidents. Some of my brothers had reputations for being a bit wild; other boys said they’d “do anything.” I watched them do any number of crazy things to other kids around the squares, and I watched the other kids do some brutal things in return. One time, the family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under sixteen commits an offense: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to assess what the real problem is and decide whether the child should be in care—which in my brother’s case would have meant a residential, List D school. In the event, that didn’t happen, but it took a long time for the community—especially our teachers—to forget what he did. With a friend, he’d burnt down a wing of our local Catholic secondary school.
It’s not that any of us were evil; even the more bookish and shy among us were given to a bit of destructive boredom and stupid imagining. Now and then it got out of hand. The boys I hung around with in my preteen years were always losing their heads. During the good weather, the light nights, what started off as a game of rounders or crazy golf would end up as a game of clubbing the neighbor’s cat to death. A night of camping on the playing fields could usually be turned into an opportunity for the wrecking of vegetable gardens, or the killing of frogs and people’s pet rabbits. Mindless stuff. Yet now and again people would get into things that you sensed were about to go over the edge, or were already over it. My memory tells me that that point was much more difficult to judge than I’d now like to think.
My friend Moggie began taking music lessons at the house of a woman who lived in the next square. She started going out when she was supposed to be teaching him, leaving him to babysit her child, who was not yet a year old. Moggie would have been about seven or eight. One day I was in with him, bashing uselessly on her old piano, when he shouted me to the front of the living room.
“I’m biting the baby,” he said. “D’you want to?”
The baby was lying on a white toweling nappy and Moggie was bent over her, biting her arms and then her legs and then the cheeks of her face. He said he did it all the time and that the baby liked it. He said it was like tickling. I didn’t want to do it but said I’d stay and watch. Another game he played was to put on a record, hoist the baby onto her legs and shake her in time to the music. She obviously wasn’t walking yet, but he would jostle her and jam her legs on the carpet. Her head would jerk about and she would cry. Some time later, the bite marks were discovered and Moggie was barred from the house, although everyone—including the baby’s parents—said that she had been bitten by the dog. I got to stay, since the woman reckoned I was sensible. Another boy who came to that house used to swallow handfuls of the woman’s pills (she always had a great variety lying around, so much so that her daughter was eventually rushed to hospital after eating a load). Moggie joined the navy, and the pill swallower was at the edge of a mob of boys who killed someone at a local ATM ten years later. In the years that I hung around it, that house (and there were many others like it) had been the site of a large number of life-threatening games, solvent abuses and youthful experiments gone wrong.
Something happened when we all got together, even though we were that young. We were competitive, deluded and full of our own small powers. And, of course, we spoke our own language. We had our own way of walking—which wasn’t unlike that of the two boys on the video—dragging our feet, hands in our pockets, heads always lolling towards the shoulder. That culpable tilt gave the full measure of our arrogant, untelling ways. As only dependents can be, we were full of our own independence. The approval that really mattered was that of the wee Moggies and Bennas and Caesars we ran around with. There were times when I’m sure we could’ve led each other into just about anything.
Just William–type adventures—earning pocket money or looking for fun—would more often than not end in nastiness or threats to each other or danger to other people, especially to girls our own age and younger boys. There was badness in it, a form of delinquency that most of us have left behind. The girls with whom I read books and colored-in, with whom I regularly played office, were the victims of verbal taunting, harassment and gang violence when I ran around with boys. We all carried sticks and were all of us baby arsonists who could never get enough matches. We stole them from our houses, stole money out of our mothers’ purses with which to buy them and begged them from construction workers. I can remember pleading with my mother to buy me a Little Big Man action doll from Woolworth’s and then burning it in a field with my pals. Most of our games, when I think of it, were predicated on someone else’s humiliation or eventual pain. It made us feel strong and untouchable.
If all of this sounds uncommonly horrific, then I can only say that it did not seem so then; it was the main way that most of the boys I knew used up their spare time. There was no steady regression towards the juvenile barbarism famously characterized in Lord of the Flies. We lived two lives at once: while most of the stuff detailed above went on, we all made our first communions, sang in the school choir, did our homework, became altar boys and some went to matches or played brilliantly at football. We didn’t stop to think, nor did our parents, that something dire might result from the darker of our extracurricular activities. Except when that murky side took over, and your bad-bastardness became obvious to everyone.
Bullies who had no aptitude for classwork—who always got “easily distracted” scribbled in red ink on report cards that never made it home—had unbelievable concentration when it came to torturing minors, in the playground or on the way home. For many of the pupils bullying was a serious game. It involved strategies, points scored for and against, and not a little detailed planning. It was scary, competitive and brought out the very worst in those who had anything to do with it. Kids who were targeted over a long period we thought deviant in some way, by which I mean that they were in some way out of it—maybe serious, bright, quiet, keeping themselves to themselves. When I was nine, there was a particular boy who lived two squares up. For years I’d listened to boys telling of how they’d love to do him in. I sort of liked him, but even so, I joined in the chase when we pursued him in and out of the development and across fields. This stood high in our repertoire of time fillers. “Where’s Broon?”—the boy’s name was Alan Brown—took its place in a list of nasty games that included snipes (skinning each other’s knuckles with cards after each lost game), kiss, cuddle and torture (with girls), blue murder (the same, but sorer) and that kind of thing. If anyone came to the door when these games had gone too far, our mothers and fathers went ape. Belted and sent to bed, many of us would get up after dark and stare out the window, over the square, into each other’s bedrooms. We grinned and flashed our torches, trying to pass messages. The message, I remember, was always quite clear: it meant, see you tomorrow.
Even the youths who came from happy homes enjoyed the childish ritual of running away. When parents, sick with anxiety, came to the door or to school looking for their children, we’d never let on. We’d help eleven-year-old absconders get together the bus fare to a bigger place, all of us filling a bag with stolen tins and chipping in coppers for some hero’s running-away fund. Of course, they’d always be caught and brought back, but not before we’d enjoyed the parental worry and the police presence in the classroom while the drama lasted. We all took and assigned roles in cruel little dramas of our own devising. Our talk would be full of new and interesting ways to worry or harass our parents, especially our fathers, whom we all hated. Stealing his fags or drink brought a great, often awesome feeling of quid pro quo.
I found many girls to be the same in that respect: I had a twelve-year-old table-tennis friend, Alison, who told us she’d been crushing old light bulbs in a bowl and sprinkling them into her father’s porridge. We thought that was great. Some of us knew how to stop it, though, while others just kept it up. A couple of my boyhood friends assiduously built bridges between their mindless, childish venom—their bad-boyish misdemeanors—and adult crime. Not many, but some.
Around the time of our cruelty to the boy David, the local news was full of the disappearance of a three-year-old boy called Sandy Davidson, who’d last been seen playing on one of the town’s many open construction sites. Guesses were that he’d either fallen into a pipe trench and been covered, or that he’d been abducted. He was never found. We thought about him, in class we prayed for him, and when we weren’t out looking for something to get into, we tried to figure out what had happened to him.
Our mothers’ warnings to stay clear of the dumps taught us that Sandy’s fate could easily have been our own. And in silent, instinctive ways I’m sure we understood something of Sandy’s other possible end, the one that wasn’t an accident. We knew something of children’s fearsome cruelty to children, and we lived with our own passion for misadventure. Though we knew it neither as cruelty nor as misadventure. No one believed that Sandy was playing alone at the building site that day. We didn’t know it then, but as many of us grew older we came to think it not inconceivable that Sandy had come to grief at the hands of boys not a lot older than himself, playing in a makeshift sandpit. All of these things have returned with the news of James Bulger’s murder. More than once this week, a single image has floated into my head: a grainy Strathclyde Police picture of a sandy-haired boy, with its caption “Have You Seen Sandy?”
Product details
- ASIN : B008LQ1OWS
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First edition (January 22, 2013)
- Publication date : January 22, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 3397 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 368 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,636,219 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,825 in American Literature Anthologies
- #3,881 in British & Irish Literature
- #4,170 in International Relations (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Instagram: @andrewohaganauthor
BIOGRAPHY
Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow. His novel Mayflies won the Christopher Isherwood Prize. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize, was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, and won the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Editor-at-Large of the London Review of Books and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Andrew also writes regularly for The New Yorker, Esquire, and the New York Review of Books. In 2024, he was made an Honorary Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow.
The BBC adaptation of Mayflies, produced by Synchronic Films, won a BAFTA for best scripted drama in 2023.
Caledonian Road is to become a returning TV drama, produced by Sinestra Films, directed by Johan Renck (who directed Chernobyl for HBO), and the show runner is Will Smith who wrote Slow Horses.
UPDATE
My last novel, Mayflies, published n 2021, is the story of Tully Dawson, a music-loving hero, the narrator's best friend. They made a small legend of their glory years. In the summer of 1986 their shared love of bands and politics projects them, with a group of their chums, to a festival in Manchester and the very pinnacle of their youth. Thirty years later, the telephone rings. Tully is facing the crisis of his life and that old friendship is put to the test.
I was overwhelmed by the way Mayflies was taken up by readers. I still get hundreds of messages from readers throughout the world -- men and women who identify with the deep friendship of Tully, Jimmy and the boys. Many of my readers lost someone in their lives and the book, in a way, seemed to become a rallying place for readers who'd experienced such personal loss. The book, and it's adaptation by the BBC, really struck a chord and the story is very close to my heart.
For my new book Caledonian Road, I worked on a much bigger canvas, giving a portrait of modern Britain, but it is no less intimate -- in some ways, it is more so. As with Mayflies, it's a story about a man finding out what he's made of -- but in this case, he is also about to find out what the society he lives in is made of.
Campbell Flynn is a fifty-something Scottish art historian living off the Caledonian Road. He is successful, well-connected, living in a big house in a beautiful square, with a wife he loves and interesting children. But something is going badly wrong. The quintessential 'good liberal', Campbell is teetering on the edge of something awful -- he is losing himself. Is he decent? Has he been ignoring what his friends have been doing? Is he obsessed with money? Is he is falling into error? Is he on 'the right side of history"? Over the course of a single year, from May 2021, secrets and corruptions begin to be revealed to Campbell, and his own mistakes begin to take over his life.
'He always knew that when his life came tumbling down, it would occur in public.'
Power. Money. Politics.
Set at the high water mark of Boris Johnson's Britain, Caledonian Road is a story of our times, the story of one man's epic fall from grace.
One American journalist has called it 'like having a backstage pass to London'. That's what I wanted to write: in the great tradition of the Victorian novel, a page-turning with ethical eruptions.
'A BARNSTORMING NOVEL'
The Observer
'WHERE ARE ALL THE GREAT STATE-OF-THE-NATION NOVELS? STEP FORWARD ANDREW O'HAGAN'
The Sunday Times
'PULLS DOWN THE FACADES OF HIGH SOCIETY...AN UTTER JOY TO READ.'
Monica Ali
'WITH THIS MAGNUM OPUS, O'HAGAN HAS MADE A SOCIAL MIRACLE.'
Pulitzer prizewinner Josh Cohen
'I LOVED THIS NOVEL -- LOVED ITS AMBITION AND SCALE AND SCOPE AND CERTAINTY -- IT'S PANACHE AND BRIO AND JOY IN THE WRITING.'
Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown
A JOURNEY INTO MY BOOKS
I grew up loving stories where real worlds and imagined ones fuse together. There's a grain of fiction in every day facts, and a quality of fact in the fiction I care about. To tell the truth, I've always felt that Britain is as pretty under-described territory, so from the beginning it seemed natural to me that reporting and memory, as much as plot and invention, might open up new stories to readers.
My first book was The Missing. I was in my 20s then, and was still thinking about a child who had disappeared from a housing estate near ours in Ayrshire. I went in search of him, and it became a search into the lost nature of my own family story, as well as a tendency, in certain British lives, for people's narratives to fade. I covered the trial of the killer Rosemary West and looked for the stories of the victims, many of whom had never been reported as missing. When the book came out it seemed to chime with an atmosphere in Britain, a worry about what our politics was doing to our sense of decency and the common good, and I followed it with essays about the the state of the nation. I've never really stopped writing those pieces, most of them appearing in the London Review of Books.
My first novel really grew out of those enquiries. I wanted to animate the idealism behind the slum-clearance obsession in Glasgow in the 1960s, and it centred on one family, the Bawns, and their post-war experience. When the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a lot of people wrote to me about what was happening in their own communities. Some of those people were from Eastern Europe, too, talking about how fiction might play a part in understanding 'improvement' and raising awareness of how we live now.
I was gripped by the rise of celebrity culture and wrote a novel, Personality, a book in many voices, inspired by the life of a young singer from a Scottish island who suffers in the midst of fame. That interest took a comic turn in The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, narrated by Marilyn Monroe's dog, a real little entity called Mafia Honey. (Given to Marilyn in 1960 by Frank Sinatra. For real.) I spent a lot of time in American researching that book, making TV programmes and getting to know the absurd.
In Be Near Me, I focused on the problem of a troubled and troubling priest living in a small Scottish community, suddenly wrapped up in a blaze of publicity that sends him back into his own conscience and memory. And in The Illuminations, I told the story of a young soldier returning from Afghanistan, and his closeness to his grandmother, a documentary photographer with a host of secrets in her past.
Writing, for me, has always been a process of entering into a dialogue with my readers, finding common ground and fresh debate. It's great meeting audiences at festivals and hearing how the stories I've tried to unearth sit with their experience. Our common knowledge of the world is constantly changing -- being deepened, altered, challenged, made new -- and I've used reportage and the essay to engage in my own way with those changes. The digital world is a place of thrilling power-displacement and threat and I have sat inside that world and described it close-up in my writing. The Secret Life, a book of non-fiction, gives accounts from the front line with Julian Assange, with the purported inventor of Bitcoin, and from a digital world where identity is unstable. In The Atlantic Ocean, essays and reports from all of those fronts, and others -- hurricanes, court cases, journeys into war -- were brought together to show readers that truthful writing might still be our best mode of witnessing.
Mayflies distilled a single summer and a lifelong friendship into a bestselling book.
With Caledonian Road, I feel I've used the past to reach into the present, to find a new kind of story. A reported novel, it dramatises the internet era in modern London.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
A version of this book was published in 2000, and you might want to know about the differences between that edition and this one. First of all, there is an excellent introduction in the 2000 edition, but none in this one. The following essays appear in the 2000 edition, but not in this one:
Scotland's Old Injury
Tony and the Queen
Cowboy George
Celebrity Memoirs
On Hating Football
Poetry As Self-Help
My Grandfather's Ship
Faces of Michael Jackson
American Way of Sorrow
The Garbage of England
The following is a listing of the essays in this volume, together with an indication of what the essay is about (if it's not obvious from the title) and an indication if it does not appear in the 2000 edition:
The Killing of James Bulger (the infamous murder of a two-year old boy by two 10-year old boys in Liverpool, who lured him from a shopping center)
On Begging (London homeless)
The Glasgow Sludge Boat (boats that carry treated sewage below, for dumping into the open, and Bingo-playing senior citizens above)
The American Dream of Lee Harvey Oswald (Norman Mailer's book Oswald's Tale, the Memory of a Nation museum in Dallas's Texas Book Depository building and, just a few blocks away, the Conspiracy Museum, )
Many Andies (Andy Warhol) (not in the 2000 edition)
Good Fibs (Truman Capote) (published April 2, 1998 in the London Review of Books and available in its entirety online without subscription; not in the 2000 edition)
England's Flowers (white lilies, grown in the millions in Israel, how they end up in England and how the English psyche is revealed through flowers)
Saint Marilyn (Christie's sale of Marilyn Monroe clothing and memorabilia; how she and her belongings are interpreted to provide the meaning of 20th century America)
7/7 (The July 7, 2005 bombings in London, in which four suicide bombers set of bombs on a double-decker bus and in the Underground, killing 52, not including the bombers, and injuring over 700) (not in the 2000 edition)
Introduction to Go Tell It On the Mountain (James Baldwin and the writing of his first novel) (not in the 2000 edition)
On the End of British Farming (the hoof-and-mouth disease disaster, the history and dire economics of British farming, how we divorce grocery store products from how food gets there
England and the Beatles (placing the Beatles in the context of their time and place)
On Lad Magazines (on the glorification of male drunken idiocy in British society and media)
Four Funerals and a Wedding (thoughts about the funerals of O'Hagan's schoolteacher, Pope John Paul II, author Saul Bellow and Monaco's Prince Rainier; and some quite nasty observations about the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles and the television coverage of the event)
After Hurricane Katrina
Brothers (Englishman Anthony Wakefield, killed by an IED, and American John Spahr, killed in a military jet collision, both in southern Iraq in 2005
Racing Against Reality (review of Don DeLillo's Falling Man , about a survivor of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center) (not in the 2000 edition)
Guilt: A Memoir (O'Hagan's Catholic childhood) (not in the 2000 edition)
The Boy Who Mistook His Life for a Crime (the post-prison life of Jon Venables, who was 10 years old when he murdered two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool) (not in the 2000 edition)
E. M. Forster: The Story of Affection (Forster's life and a review of Wendy Moffat's biography, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster ) (not in the 2000 edition)
Styron's Choice (William Styron and his daughter Alexandra Styron's memoir, Reading My Father: A Memoir ) (not in the 2000 edition)
Occasionally, O'Hagan is able to jar the reader out of a comfortable sense of complacency, as he does with the first essay in this collection, a rumination on how close childhood cruelty may come to tipping over the edge and leading to murder, as it did in the killing of young James Bulger by two older children in England. The author draws on his own experience growing up in one of the grittier parts of Glasgow, itself one of the tougher cities in Britain, and his insights are simultaneously horrifying and persuasive. Indeed, it is when O'Hagan himself can bring not just a personal point of view but first-person experience to bear on a topic that the essay works as not only an interesting read but a coherent, focused and articulate argument. (Cases in point include his early article on begging, in which he goes 'undercover' on the streets of London in light of the increased hostility to the so-called professional beggars, or his trip alongside two ad hoc volunteers from North Carolina as they travel to New Orleans and Mississippi in an ill-defined quest to 'help out' in the wake of Hurricane Katrina). In other cases, O'Hagan has opinions or ideas, but while the essays themselves are beautifully written and occasionally produce phrases that transcend the concept of the 'mot juste' (eg, his pithy comment that "a great many novels, flat with accomplishment, are too much about what they're about", which perfectly captures my own reaction to several much-lauded recent books) there is nothing fresh or particularly engaging about what he is saying.
We get O'Hagan's views on Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, the Beatles and Don DeLillo -- but by the time he rambled his way through a circuitous argument only to arrive at a rather banal conclusion, I found those views weren't particularly engaging or novel. There's also a lot of repetitiveness among the circular prose -- in combination, this is toxic. Three or four separate essays mention or discuss O'Hagan's aversion to cellophane-wrapped bouquets of flowers as public tributes. That's fine -- but say it once, in a memorable way. A 42-page essay on British farming examines the same themes and ideas repeatedly: none of them are new news to anyone (or were at the time it was written), making it all the more important for O'Hagan to find a way to make the reader sit up and really think about them.
The writing throughout this volume is elegant and thoughtful, even beautiful at times. But to be excellent, an essay must also be crisp and focused, however long it is. (This is something that Timothy Garton Ash can pull off more often, even writing for the same publications.) Alternatively, if the essayist is intent on taking me on a long, roundabout tour of a topic, I expect the observations along the way to be intriguing or startling -- or at least fresh and compelling. That doesn't happen here.
The result? A collection of well-written and potentially interesting articles that don't always live up to their initial promise, but that I am still happy to have discovered.