James Meek is a contributing editor at the LRB. His new novel, Your Life without Me, will be published in 2026.
In Ajax bar in Oxford, Mississippi, they muted the baseball commentary during the Obama-Romney debate and left the game playing on the screen near the door while the candidates sparred on the big screen over the bar. We couldn't make out the nitty-gritty of what they were saying, just the mood music: Mitt v. Barack sounded like marching band Sousa v. the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Does it matter that the power Britain relies on to make the country glow and hum no longer belongs to Britain? After all, the lights still shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E.ON of Düsseldorf?
If you forget the name, you’ll remember the braids; the blonde corona framing her head that declares: ‘Ukraine, c’est moi.’ After Angela Merkel, Yulia Tymoshenko is perhaps (Mrs Thatcher excepted) the European woman politician best known outside her own country. Merkel is low-key and plain-speaking, an austere, common-sense pragmatist; Tymoshenko, the imprisoned former...
Rebecca Simmonds spread her debt duvet out over the sofa in the rented one-room flat in East London she shares with her partner, Aaron. The first panel in the quilt is a letter from the Alliance & Leicester bank, dated February 2005. Simmonds was 25. She had no assets and no steady job (she was trying to become an actor) and the bank was, the letter says, ‘very pleased’ to be...
One evening in London in 2004, knots of people – mainly mothers with young children – gathered on the pavement along the northern end of the No. 73 bus route. As the buses clattered through Stoke Newington, their ancient engines straining to accelerate up the slight slope of Albion Road, the children waved. It was the last night the old double-decker Routemaster bus would do duty...
James Meek talks to Tom about the events leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the fall of Yanukovych to the wars in the Donbas and Nagorno-Karabakh, and considers what may happen next.
James Meek reports from Mykolaiv and the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve occupied west of the...
James Meek, recently returned from Mykolaiv, talks to Tom about the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve...
James Meek reads from his piece on the British army’s eight years in Afghanistan.
James Meek argues that the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
James Meek talks to Chris Bickerton about his new book, Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, which features writing published originally in the LRB.
Tony Wood talks to James Meek about his book Russia with Putin, which looks at, among other things, the legacy of Soviet infrastructure and the extent of political opposition in today’s Russia.
David Runciman talks to James Meek about what the Covid crisis has revealed about how we understand healthcare and how we think about the organisations tasked with delivering it. Their conversation covers...
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...
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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