In 1997, as Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love was about to have its premiere, the New Yorker writer Anthony Lane approached his editor with an idea for a piece about the play’s subject, A E Housman. Tina Brown fixed the nervous critic with her piercing blue eyes and asked: “Is Housman hot?”
Lane was nonplussed. Housman, a formidable classicist and poet, was not only painfully shy and crabbed, the guy had been dead for 60 years. In a very real sense, he was not “hot”. Yet Brown commissioned the article anyway, and gave it a generous amount of space. I should probably admit at this point that Lane is my other half. He always laughs when he tells that story, marvelling at his former boss’s fearless ability to combine high and low: “If anyone could make Housman hot, it was Tina.”
Brown is the greatest magazine editor of her generation, but her deafening successes, which should have silenced...
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