The greatest editor who never was

By Anthony Gardner

I’d been trying to get into journalism for two years, and was close to despair, when Ann Barr—who died on Monday aged 85—gave me my first break. I couldn’t have asked for a better apprenticeship. As features editor of Harpers & Queen in the 1970s and early 1980s, Ann helped to create the quintessential magazine of that era, proudly bearing the spineline, “The world’s most intelligent glossy”. Her diamond-sharp eye for trends and detail made “The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook”, which she edited with Peter York, into an unexpected million-seller.

This acuity was masked by a nervous, chaotic exterior. She was sometimes mistaken for a bag lady as she travelled to and from the office weighed down by typescripts and newspaper cuttings (though at parties she could look resplendent in her favourite Thea Porter jacket, embroidered with lobsters and other sea creatures.) “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said when she interviewed me in the lobby of H&Q’s Soho offices. Her eyes raced across the editing test I’d been set. “You’ve done this bit well, but you’ve missed that. I don’t know.” At that moment a rumpled figure in jeans and gym shoes passed us on his way to the lift: Loyd Grossman, the magazine’s design editor and restaurant critic, whom Ann perceived to be an enemy. “Perhaps we’ve got too many men on the magazine already,” she said. “Oh dear.”