James Meek

It’s striking how many times, in the past few months, Putin has been accused of being behind the transport of migrants from the Middle East to the borders of the EU through Belarus, and, separately, of being about to invade Ukraine, and, separately, of manipulating gas supplies to Europe; it’s also striking how few times the commentators consider what it would mean for all these accusations to be true. It’s quite possible they are, but this implies a greater degree of uncertainty and contradiction within the Kremlin than we’ve been comfortable imagining in the late Putin era. Let’s suppose Putin did help enable, or green-lighted, the cruel wheeze by Lukashenko to lure migrants to Belarus with the promise of transit over the border to Poland. Perhaps the cash-strapped, sanctioned Lukashenko had hopes of getting leverage over Berlin, but what would have been in it for Russia? If Putin and Lukashenko meant to turn the peoples of the EU against their leaders, it was a weak as well as a vicious way to go about it.

Keith Ridgway’s​ sixth novel, A Shock, doesn’t follow a central character, or even, substantially, a set of characters. It’s peopled by loosely acquainted present-day South Londoners, anxious, precariously employed, bright and lonely. Diverse by age, ethnicity and sexuality, they’re narrower by class: nobody well off enough to own a whole house, and nobody in real,...

It​ wasn’t much of an investigation, and it wasn’t much of an experiment. It was like the kind of measuring you do in primary school and call an experiment: I came back from the deli and put the kettle on. From the jump on the smart meter (already installed when we moved in a couple of years ago) I worked out the kettle was sucking in about three kilowatts of power. It took a...

The equivalent of almost all Scotland’s electricity is now supplied by renewables, and when demand is low and the weather blustery, wind turbines generate two-thirds of the wattage Britain needs. You might accept that Britain has ceded tech sovereignty to overseas multinationals, and say, well, let them at least be competent and effective ones, like Siemens and Vestas. But even as I write this, it has a hollow ring. Suppose I make the distinction between a false populist portrayal of the wind energy revolution as a triumph of national ingenuity and my own understanding of it as a vital endeavour engaging the whole species – one in which the greater ingenuity, foresight and can-do spirit has, this time, been shown by the Danes. The trouble is that these narratives aren’t very far apart. If the Boris Johnson version is neo-aristocratic, boasting of improvements to the landed estate that is Britain, mine is neo-romantic: humanity, and the version of nature we know, may yet be saved! The trouble is that the aristocrat and the romantic have much in common. Each tends to overlook those who do the spade-work, those whose hand holds the welding rod.

When​ his company commander vanished from the front line at the end of 2015, the Ukrainian conscript and novelist Artem Chekh was told he’d deserted and gone over to the enemy. Through the winter Chekh and his comrades were encouraged to believe their captain was a traitor, laughing at them from the line of separatist bunkers opposite their own, lavishly equipped with warm clothes by...