Writer Andrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. He started his career with a non-fiction book, The Missing (1995), and has since written five novels including Our Fathers (1999), Be Near Me (2006) and a brand new one, The Illuminations, published by Faber & Faber. O’Hagan is also known for his essays in the London Review of Books, where he is editor-at-large. He has won the Los Angeles Times book prize and the EM Forster award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.
Architecture: Musée des Confluences
A couple of heart-stopping buildings appeared in France recently. Frank Gehry’s “cloud of glass” at the edge of Paris’s Jardin d’Acclimatation is magnificent, but even more impressive is this new museum in Lyon, built by the Viennese group Coop Himmelb(l)au. It’s like a giant version of the starship in the 1981 arcade game Defender. And if that’s not enough, you’re allowed to touch the objects.
Music: Adam Holmes – Heirs & Graces
A soft-spoken singer-songwriter from Edinburgh, Adam Holmes is only 24 years old and writes the kind of love ballad that would bring a tear to a glass eye. This is folk music with a kind of tough elegance. He’s going to be massive.
Television: Celebrity Big Brother
This never gets old for me. I’m just a knot of cringe watching it. There’s something about the conditions – the mad, ugly conditions – that causes people with a horrid nature to reveal themselves almost immediately. I think it should be a set text for novelists, though it might tip you over the edge before writing a page.
Radio: War and Peace
Tolstoy’s novel brings history down to the level of chatter, which somehow makes it a natural work for radio. Timberlake Wertenbaker adapted it for Radio 4 with a terrific sense of the audience overhearing what was going on – it was a little miracle of intimacy, and Simon Russell Beale did the best Napoleon this side of Marlon Brando.
Website: Forgotify
Teenagers used to cover themselves in glory by listening to music that was hard to find or not yet very popular, but now they instantly like what everybody likes. That’s why I love this site, which randomly plays one of the 4m tracks on Spotify that has never been played. It’s probably a good way to kill a party. Lithuanian synth pop, anyone?
Art: David Birkin at the Mosaic Rooms, London
In this new show, called Mouths at the Invisible Event, the English artist David Birkin is caught thinking intelligently about surveillance, censorship, and the “war against terror”. One of his works involved sending a biplane around the Statue of Liberty dragging the message: “The shadow of a doubt”. Another shows a news photograph of a grieving Afghan mother blanked out with the blue of lapis lazuli, one of the key colours in the history of western art, but mined in Afghanistan. It is a contemporary pieta, and Birkin’s show is a brilliant forcefield of moral enquiry.
