James Meek

James Meek is a contributing editor at the LRB. His new novel, Your Life without Me, will be published in 2026.

In Farageland

James Meek, 9 October 2014

Thanet, where Nigel Farage will try to win a Westminster seat at the next election, lies nicely along the axis of his commute between his home in South London and his office at the European Parliament in Brussels. If Kent, cartographically speaking, is England’s rigfht foot, the Isle of Thanet is its big toe, pointing east into the sea towards Belgium. It hasn’t been an actual island since the 15th century, when the channel separating it from the English mainland silted up, but it’s still surrounded by water on three sides, and when the sun shines in summer, the light suffusing the air over the chubby peninsula has a vertiginous depthlessness.

From The Blog
19 September 2014

The early Scottish referendum results didn't look good for the would-be dividers of the kingdom. My pro-independence Orcadian friend, down in London for a wine fair, went to bed before three a.m., disconsolate, not long after a furious thunderstorm lit up the deserted streets and made drums of the cars. I stayed awake long enough for the moment around four when my home town of Dundee went heavily for Yes, swiftly followed by another Yes in West Dunbartonshire. Suddenly the two camps were neck and neck.

From The Blog
6 August 2014

Will Vladimir Putin order direct military intervention in Ukraine? Russia already enables a free flow of Russian volunteers and mercenaries to fight against government forces in eastern Ukraine. It is supplying the rebels with weapons, vehicles and ammunition. It is shelling and rocketing Ukrainian territory daily, and promotes the portrayal of the Kiev government as cruel, illegitimate fascists in Russian-language media. The key leaders of the rebels, like Igor Strelkov, Alexander Borodai, Igor Bezler, Nikolai Kozitsyn and Vladimir Antyufeyev, are Russian citizens or Russian nationalists from ex-Soviet territories under Russian control.

From The Blog
19 July 2014

We can't be sure that, in the tragedy of Vladimir Putin and Russia, the tragedy of the privatisation of a beautiful old prison by one of its former jailers, a new act has begun. The governments of Europe may hold their breath, move on, tut and do nothing while France sells Russia a powerful new warship in the autumn. Or they may decide that letting Russia invade and promote killing and destruction in neighbouring countries is a bad thing. As the Financial Timeswrites in an editorial, 'Russia will become an international pariah and a dark new era in East-West relations will begin.'

My family kept a leopard. It shared space with us, my parents and my brother and sisters, in every house I remember. It was with us in London, moved with us to Nottingham and crossed the border with us into Scotland when I was five. We had to bunk up two to a room in the early years in Dundee, my siblings and I, but there was always a place for the leopard. When we dispersed to university, we left the leopard behind with our parents. It’s still there, in the cool brightness of the porch of their house on the hill in Broughty Ferry in the east of Dundee, with logs and potatoes and an old sideboard hand-decorated by my mother.

Planes, Trains and SUVs: James Meek

Jonathan Raban, 7 February 2008

James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and...

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Dynamite for Cologne: James Meek

Michael Wood, 21 July 2005

James Meek’s early fiction is alert, acrid and funny, and only slightly too insistent on its own quirkiness – as if it were hoping reviewers would call it surreal (they did) and...

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