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“American men don’t think as much
about baseball as they used to,” reflected
Roger Angell as he approached 90. Not
only were his writings elegant testimo-
ny to the sport’s attraction but they
reflected the diverse interests — from
jazz to golf, sailing and cemetery touring
— of a man who also, as a long-serving
fiction editor at The New Yorker, gave
close and much-appreciated finessing
of manuscripts by authors including
John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov.
Angell naturally knew everybody
associated with the magazine. Perhaps
symbolic of the leisurely atmosphere it
cultivated amid the hubbub of New
York was that he and the Scots poet
Alastair Reid waged a fierce battle of
palindromes. Angell eventually won,
coming up with arguably the world’s
longest palindrome, though it required
the reader to know that the speaker is a
mad, confined war veteran: “Marge, let
dam dogs in. Am on satire: Vow I am
Cain. Am on spot, am a Jap sniper. Red,
raw murder on GI! Ignore drum.
(Warder repins pajama tops.) No mani-
ac, Ma! Iwo veritas: no man is God —
Mad Telegram.”
He was born in 1920 in New York,
where his father, Ernest, was a Har-
vard-educated lawyer and his mother
Katharine (née Sergeant) a writer and
editor. In the First World War Ernest
had been an intelligence officer in
France, while Katharine was looking
after their daughter Nancy. As Roger
put it, his father returned after three
years “with different ideas about sex
and marriage. He had even encouraged
her [Katharine] to try an affair of her
own: they would be a modern couple.”
She duly had an affair with the writer
EB White; they married with only
Katharine’s dog in attendance. Both
were stalwarts of The New Yorker, he as
a multifarious writer and she as the
magazine’s fiction editor.
Angell and his sister Nancy remained
with their father in a narrow brown-
stone on East 93rd Street with a series
of governesses, and he was aware of
hard times in a city which took on “a
shrivelled appearance; nothing is paint-
ed or shined, and the people one passes
on the sidewalk move slowly, with a
stunned look on their face”. He went to
“the lively, faintly cuckoo” progressive
Lincoln School and each week could
hardly wait for visits to his mother and
As chief fiction editor, Angell had a
special regard for VS Pritchett, whose
eighties resulted in a resurgence of
short stories; he took pleasure, too, in
nurturing Donald Barthelme, whose
sentences could be “offhand, complex,
lighthearted and poignant all at the
same time”. Angell was also masterly in
being able to reject something while, in
all sincerity, encouraging an author to
keep working on their craft. A case in
point was the young Ann Beattie, ten of
whose stories he rejected. She stuck
with it, and Angell, when accepting A
Platonic Relationship in 1973, told her
that “I think this is just about the best
news of the year... there is nothing that
gives me more pleasure (well, almost
nothing) than at last sending an enthu-
siastic ‘yes’ to a writer who has persisted
through as many rejections and rebuffsas you have.” After this, a series of her
stories appeared in the magazine and
she became something of a cult writer.
Angell divorced Evelyn in 1963 and
the following year he married Carol
Rogge, a secretary at The New Yorker.
They were married for 48 years and
when Carol was dying she told him, “If
you haven’t found someone else by a
year after I’m gone I’ll come back and
haunt you.” He complied and began a
relationship with Peggy Moorman,
whom he married in 2014. She survives
him along with his son, John Henry,
whom Angell and his second wife
adopted, and a stepdaughter, Emma,
from his third marriage. His two daugh-
ters from his first marriage predeceased
him: Callie died by suicide in 2010 and
Alice died of cancer in 2019.
Angell himself was a prolific writer,
producing fiction, poems, reviews and
essays. His books began with the paro-
dies and other short pieces in A Day in
the Life of Roger Angell (1970). Among
his baseball volumes were Five Seasons
(1977), Season Ticket (1988), and Game
Time (2003). He published his final col-
lection of musings and meditations,
This Old Man, in 2015.
If his writing owed much to his
mother, his interest in baseball
stemmed from his father, who took him
and Nancy to games as children. As
Angell recalled, “Baseball memories
are seductive, tempting us always to-
ward sweetness and undercomplexity.”
With A Pitcher’s Story (2001), he
spent a year with the New York Yankees
pitcher David Cone, who promptly
went through a rough patch, of which
Angell wrote: “Pitching is style, and
when you have it it appears innate and
touchable: yes, this is me. When it’s
gone, you must think and grope — it’s
more a psychic loss than something
mechanical — and you feel bereft and
clunky even before you’ve been pun-
ished by another defeat. Now the key
had been turned, and style, from
wherever it had been, came whispering
back, perhaps to stay a bit and to make
it all feel so easy.”
For him, baseball and so much else
were as much art as life.Roger Angell, writer and editor, was
born on September 19, 1920. He died of
congestive heart failure on May 20,
2022, aged 101Previously Hall had taught in
London comprehensive schools, where
he was known for wearing a big black
hat, leaping around the classroom and
smashing down desk lids. However, he
had to deal with race discrimination
when white teachers were promotedRoger Angell
Author and long-serving fiction editor at The New Yorker who developed a sporting hinterland as the ‘poet laureate of baseball’
MIKE GROLL/ASSOCIATED PRESSProfessor Ian Hall
Organist and founder of the Bloomsbury International Society who regarded music as a means to overcome discrimination
Ian Hall started the Bloomsbury Inter-
national Society in 1972 as a vehicle for
promoting racial harmony through the
arts and especially music. Under its
aegis audiences could observe a sitar
meeting a violin, Westminster Abbey
resounding to the twang of a steel band,
and thumping Ashanti drums accom-
panying baroque brass instruments at
the Commonwealth Institute with the
Queen in the audience.
On one occasion he conducted the
University of London choir in Westmin-
ster Abbey backed by the African Musi-
cal Ensemble. “Suddenly there was a
boom, with bells ringing, rattles rattling,
cowbells chiming and all sorts of African
instruments revealing their own parti-
cular rich rhythms, along with a fanfare
of trumpets, the organ ringing out its
deep voice and the choir singing the
Lord’s Prayer,” recalled an observer.
Through the society, Hall met every-
one from Benjamin Britten and the
tenor Peter Pears to Nelson Mandela
and the Rev Al Sharpton, and was ap-
pointed special consultant to the UN
Centre Against Apartheid.
above him and on one occasion was
cleared by a disciplinary panel after
being accused of inappropriate behav-
iour by pupils who objected to his inclu-
sion of non-white music.
“Very multiracial, of course,” he said
of the schools. “Cypriots, West Indians,
all sorts of Africans, Hungarians,
French, Chinese and so on. You name it,
I’ve dealt with it.”
Ian Hall was born in Georgetown,
British Guiana (now Guyana), in 1940.
His father served with the RAF during
the war, was shot down over Belgium
and afterwards studied dentistry at
Guy’s Hospital, London. His mother
died when he was six and he was raised
by his grandmother before, in 1952, sail-
ing to Britain to join his father.
Having won a scholarship, he was
among the first black pupils at Arch-
bishop Tenison’s Grammar School,
south London, and was 14 when the
music master wrote in his report: “Still
a playboy, no serious effort.” His father
was incensed and cancelled their sum-
mer holiday, forcing his son to learn the
piano. “I was playing the preludes andfugues of Johann Sebastian Bach,” Hall
said in 2003.
He read music at Keble College, Ox-
ford, where he not only picked up a pen-
etrating Oxford accent but also repre-
sented the university as a sprinter and
played cricket for the Authentics.
Before long, Hall was an associate of
the Royal College of Organists. “At the
same time I sang for two years at South-
wark Cathedral, where I learnt a great
deal about polyphonic music,” he said. “I
also served in St Paul’s Cathedral as a
member of the Sunday evening choir
from 1964 to 1966.” He was appointed
assistant organist at St Martin-in-the-
Fields, Trafalgar Square, where in 1972
he composed the music for a requiem
Mass to mark the fourth anniversary of
the assassination of Martin Luther King.
While director of music at Achimota
School, the “Eton of Africa”, near Accra
in Ghana, he composed a setting of
Psalm 150 for local instruments includ-
ing the boma and dondo.
Returning to London, he became di-
rector of music at the University
Church of Christ the King in Blooms-bury, later moving to St Michael’s Ches-
ter Square, in Belgravia.
Meanwhile, he did a PhD in ethno-
musicology at the University of London,
where he was later director of music.
Hall was chairman of the UK com-
mittee of Festac ’77, a black and African
festival of arts and culture held in La-
gos, Nigeria, though a coup meant that
he was not reimbursed for his expenses.
In 1998 he was one of The Times’s
squad of 24 runners who ran London
Marathon in memory of Diana, Prin-
cess of Wales. He had met her on
several occasions.
After the death in 2011 in quick suc-
cession of his father, his wife Rada and
his son Andrew from a previous mar-
riage, Hall moved into a flat in West-
minster where carers helped to make
room for his piano.Professor Ian Hall, musician, was born on
January 18, 1940. He died on May 11,
2022, aged 82Hall read music at Keble College, OxfordEmail: [email protected]Angell produced fiction, poems, reviews and essayscontinen-
tal luxury
he and Evelyn socialised with Somerset
Maugham. “With his skimpy, slicked-
back hair and heavily lidded eyes, he
suggested a Galápagos tortoise, wise
and of immense age.”
In the mid-Fifties Angell joined The
New Yorker, to which he had already
contributed. As chance had it, he was
given an office in which his mother had
worked 20 years earlier: “The first time
I opened the closet door I found myself
facing a long vanity mirror and, pre-
served beneath it as if in the Smithsoni-
an, a round box of her Coty face powder.
When I mentioned the coincidence of
the occupancy to the psychiatrist I was
visiting back then, his jaw fell open.
‘The greatest single act of sublimation
in my experience,’ he proclaimed.”White’s sunny place downtown “full of
laughing, chain-smoking young writers
and artists from The New Yorker”.
Even so, he enjoyed trips throughout
the country with his father, such as the
time in Montana when Ernest called
out to his children that they should
keep absolutely still: he pointed out
“not our first diamondback [rattle-
snake] of that month but easily the big-
gest and nearest”. Back in Manhattan
the house filled with fish, snakes, toads,a coatimundi and a biting macaque
given to him as a gift. This menagerie,
delegated to the housekeepers’ atten-
tion, survived his going to boarding
school, after which came Harvard in- He was a keen
reader from an early
age, especially of his
stepfather’s writing.
At university An-
gell became friendly
with Evelyn Baker,
with whom he often
haunted jazz clubs.
They were married in
1942 and “ate up do-
mesticity”. By now
Angell had joined the
US Air Force. For
decades, he scarcely
mentioned his war
service, which he thought trifling,
“ashamed of my safe, lowly status”. He
had been accepted for armament offi-
cer training in Miami but there were de-
lays, and in February 1944 came a post
on a Seventh Air Force GI magazine in
the Central Pacific, based in Hawaii. By
Christmas 1945 he was back in Manhat-
tan, where he met his mother and wife
at the Algonquin hotel and reflected
how “our world had changed beyond
imagining. I’d not been in the war, ex-
actly, but like others back then I’d got
the idea of it.”
Then came Holiday where, as an edi-
tor and writer at the literary and travel
magazine, Angell had “a lucky six-week
dive into Europe and France, scouting
the Continent for writers and picture
ideas, or some such scam”. Amid the
He won a battle with
Alastair Reid to create
the longest palindrome
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