Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...

‘This looks absolutely rubbish’

Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin: Palantir and the NHS, 23 July 2026

... There’s​ no sign over the door of Palantir’s UK headquarters, an eight-storey neoclassical building in Soho Square. The windows are lined with thick reflective glass. When we tried to take some photographs outside recently, a man with a lanyard told us to stop. He wouldn’t be drawn on his employer: ‘It’s just a tech company ...

Why are you still here?

James Meek: Who owns Grimsby?, 23 April 2015

... extremely popular. And if political correctness is seen as strongly bound to Labour, the Lib Dems, David Cameron, the EU, the BBC, the Guardian and, in Grimsby, Melanie Onn, the movement against it is strongly connected to Ukip, Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Mail and, in Grimsby, Austin Mitchell.Before he stood aside, there was speculation Mitchell would be the ...

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... of sheets in the sitting room. He began tying them together, he had 14 in all – one for each storey. Was that enough? Once he had them all tied together, he went over and tethered one end to the window frame and threw the sheets down. The ‘ladder’ went down the length of the building and stopped about thirty feet shy of the pavement. He and Nida ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... New Labour and the Conservatives have encouraged; and the inept restructuring carried out under David Cameron in the early 2010s, sometimes called the Lansley reforms after their patron, the erstwhile Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley. The Lansley reforms left seven local organisations responsible for healthcare in Leicestershire. Five are part ...