Ian Williams

Ian Williams is a freelance journalist who lives in Liverpool.

Poisoned Words

Ian Williams, 5 May 1988

The power stations and dams of the world are among the legacies of our time likely to remain for future generations of archaeologists, who will probably find the Pyramids less enigmatic than the enclosed concrete mausolea at places like Sellafield. Brunel’s statue adorns Paddington, but where and how would anyone commemorate the builders of Chernobyl? For the Kariba North Bank power station, however, there is now a memorial-David Morrell’s Indictment. Mr Morrell is the chairman of Mitchell Construction, the original contractors for the KNB project, and his book breaks ground unturned since Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. In his pages, Mitchell Construction, in legal fiction a corporate ‘person’, comes to life like a character in a novel, persecuted and buffeted by mysteriously malign forces.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences