There was nothing to suggest that October 22 1966 would be anything other than a typically dismal Saturday at Wormwood Scrubs, a dingy Victorian prison in north-west London. Late that afternoon, inmate 455 told a guard that the idea of spending his free time watching TV with the other high-security prisoners in D Hall was a “farce” and he’d prefer to read in his cell.

He then made his way to the second-floor landing, where he squeezed through a broken window and shimmied down the outside wall into the rain-slicked exercise yard sometime between 6pm and 7pm. An accomplice waited in a hiding place on Artillery Road nearby. After a brief burst of communication over walkie-talkie, a handmade rope ladder fell into the yard as the guards and inmates settled down to their weekly film night. The most audacious prison break in modern British history had begun.

When the alarm sounded at roll call less than an hour later, the prison governor picked up the phone to call Shepherd’s Bush police station. “One of our chaps has gone over the wall,” he explained to a PC Frankling. Inmate 455 was no ordinary prisoner. George Blake, the 43-year-old ex-MI6 spy turned Soviet agent, had been unmasked in 1961 following a tip-off from a Russian defector. At the Old Bailey that May, Blake was handed a 42-year sentence, the longest non-life sentence ever given by a British court. It represented, the media reported, a year for every intelligence agent killed due to Blake’s betrayal — a claim that has been contested ever since. The severity of the punishment shocked even the prime minister Harold Macmillan, who the presiding judge had consulted the night before the verdict. “The LCJ [Lord Chief Justice] has passed a savage sentence — 42 years!” Macmillan noted in his diary.

Blake had served just five years of his sentence by the time he escaped. After a months-long manhunt, he resurfaced in East Berlin, then moved permanently to Moscow. Speculation as to the identity of his accomplices dominated the news cycle, with theories ranging from the plausible to the absurd. The novelist John le Carré mused on a potential KGB operation. Others that the escape was an elaborate inside job, with British intelligence releasing Blake in order to redeploy him against the Soviets. Perhaps he had flown incognito to Sydney, or been driven up the M1 motorway in a hearse. Some even whispered that a deep-cover Czech orchestra had smuggled Blake out of Britain in a cello case. To many, the Russian connection seemed most likely. “[Blake’s] escape was [probably] engineered indirectly by the Russians, and he is now well on the way to, if not yet behind, the Iron Curtain,” declared one broadsheet editorial.

The truth, when it finally emerged more than 20 years later, was even more extraordinary. Michael Randle and Pat Pottle were a pair of English peace activists, now middle-aged, who had met Blake at Wormwood Scrubs during a stint inside for organising a non-violent protest at Wethersfield military base in Essex. They worked on the escape plan with another inmate, Sean Bourke, a charismatic Irish career criminal with a penchant for violence and literary quotation. Their respective motivations were clear. For Randle and Pottle, Blake’s sentence represented a “vicious and indefensible” case of cold war-era political malice. For Bourke, the prison break offered an unmissable chance to inject some adventure and sense of purpose into his life.

When Randle and Pottle’s roles were publicly revealed by The Sunday Times in 1987, the blowback was immediate. They were charged with three historic offences. “It would be poetic justice,” sniffed The Sun, “if this nasty pair could be locked away for the remaining 40 years of Blake’s sentence.”

When the case went to trial at the Old Bailey in June 1991, it was in the same courtroom in which Blake had been convicted 30 years earlier. The new trial, studded with Special Branch agents, bombshell testimonies and novel legal arguments, was every bit as dramatic as its predecessor. But its impact ran even deeper, its shockwaves felt today in the British criminal justice system.

Whatever the shifts in geopolitics since Blake’s day, our collective fascination with the world of international espionage is undimmed. In April this year, two young British men were accused of spying for China and subsequently charged under the Official Secrets Act. This summer, it was difficult to scroll through social media without some reference to the unmasking of Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva, two Russian agents arrested on espionage charges in Slovenia in 2022, who were shipped back to their homeland in early August, to an effusive welcome from President Vladimir Putin. So committed were they to their cover story — an entrepreneurial Argentine family setting up home in Slovenia — that their two young children had no idea about their parents’ double life, nor spoke a word of Russian. It didn’t take a cultural critic to note the similarities to the cult TV drama The Americans.

Blake was born George Behar in Rotterdam in 1922 to a Dutch mother and Sephardic Jewish father, who was a naturalised Brit on account of his service in the first world war. Blake’s upbringing was peripatetic, with spells in the Netherlands and Egypt. Britain was a distant place experienced mostly second hand; before the outbreak of the second world war, he had visited only once. “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged,” he later said. The war made Blake. A talented linguist, he was recruited by MI6 in the early 1940s after a spell in the Dutch resistance under the nom de guerre Max de Vries. He arrived in Britain after a daring, circuitous journey through Belgium, France and Spain.

Following stints reading Russian at Cambridge University after the war, and working with naval intelligence in East Germany, Blake was posted to Seoul at the start of the Korean war. He later claimed that the brutality of the war is what fully converted him to the communist cause, after a brief university flirtation with Marxist theory: “I saw the Korean war with my own eyes — young American PoWs dying and enormous American Flying Fortresses bombing small defenceless villages. And when you [have seen] that, you don’t feel particularly proud to be on the western side.”

He was captured in 1950 and, after three years in captivity, he was released and sent to Berlin by MI6 with the goal of recruiting Soviet and East German double agents. The British had no idea that Blake had long since passed a note from his captors to the Soviet embassy offering his services as double agent. For the next eight years, he would meet his Soviet handler in London and Berlin. When he was finally summoned for interrogation in London, following a tip-off from a Polish communist defector, he quickly confessed.

The news of Blake’s treachery was met with revulsion and disbelief. One MI6 training instructor reportedly burst into tears. Leniency was not likely to be on the cards. Blake did not command the same protection afforded to the more establishment “Cambridge Five”, none of whom were ever prosecuted for their decades as Soviet double agents. Blake — unapologetic, cosmopolitan, icily intellectual — didn’t have the bonhomie of Kim Philby or booze-soaked melancholy of Guy Burgess or Donald Maclean. While Philby was offered immunity in return for his full co-operation, no similar deal was offered to Blake. “But then Blake, a foreigner, was not a gentleman,” wrote historian Ben Macintyre.

I first learnt of the Blake escape long after it happened, in Thomas Grant’s Court No.1 The Old Bailey: The Trials and Scandals that Shocked Modern Britain, published in 2019. I found myself less drawn to Blake himself than to Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, the genial peace activists, and to Sean Bourke, their squiffy accomplice. How had this unlikely trio pulled off such a daring act? Were their professed motivations really so straightforward? And why had it taken decades for the might of British intelligence to catch up with them?

In January this year, I travelled from London to Saltaire, a pretty Victorian model village on the outskirts of Bradford, West Yorkshire. The walk from the station to the Randle family home took me past a preserved former cloth mill and cluster of 19th-century terraces. On arrival, I was greeted by Michael, now well into his nineties, and his youngest son Gavin, a middle-aged musician.

I’d initially spoken to Gavin on the phone at the end of last year. It wasn’t an easy time for the family. Anne Randle, Gavin’s mother and Michael’s wife of over half a century, had recently died after a long illness. When I arrived at their home, Gavin offered up a photo of his beaming newly wed parents in the early 1960s. “I still think, ‘Oh, I must tell Anne this [or] that,’ before I realise that it isn’t possible,” Michael told me. Though there were signs his short-term memory had begun to decline, it quickly became apparent there was little wrong with his recall of the more distant past. During our afternoon together, I found both Randles urbane, winning company, the conversation serious, though laced with mischief.

Michael Randle was born in Worcester Park, Surrey in 1933. He lived in England for much of his childhood, though he spent the duration of the second world war in Ireland with his mother’s Republican family in County Carlow and Kildare. “It taught me there was more than one perspective to take [on] an issue”, he explained with wry understatement. “They lived near a prison [during] the Easter Rising and [they] could hear the executioners’ rifles from their home.” Randle, following his father, registered as a conscientious objector in his teens. In his twenties, he joined the anti-nuclear-weapons protest movement, and served as secretary of the Committee of 100, the direct action group founded by Bertrand Russell, among other grandees of the British peace movement.

Pat Pottle was born into a large, working-class family in London in 1938. His upbringing was marked by the influence of his socialist father, a trade union official. On the urging of his mother, he trained as a printer before going into business in London. Like Randle, his political commitments crystallised early on. By the end of the 1950s, Pottle was organising his first anti-war protests. He became one of the founding members of the Committee of 100 in 1960. The following year, he defended himself against charges under the Official Secrets Act relating to a sit-in at the US air base at Wethersfield, Essex. Despite putting up a spirited fight in court, Pottle, Randle and several others were jailed for 18 months and sent to Wormwood Scrubs. It was there they met George Blake.

“Pat was very outgoing. There was no side to him. He was straightforward,” said Randle when I asked him about his friend, who died in 2000 aged 62. The two men had strikingly different temperaments. “Pottle was [always] a great raconteur. He drank gin and smoked,” said Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian’s longtime former security editor and a close friend of both men. “Randle was quite ascetic and skinny. Sort of a vegetarian Quaker.” What they shared was faith in non-violent resistance.

Randle and Pottle first met Blake at a prison music class. Pottle later wrote that the sympathy between the three was mutual. Blake admired their principled anti-nuclear stance, while they considered him to be a political prisoner. Do you ever think of escaping, Pottle asked him one day. Blake replied that he thought of little else. Pottle was soon shipped out to an open prison, while Randle remained at Wormwood Scrubs, but they continued to mull over the idea of Blake’s escape.

Randle met Sean Bourke working at the prison bakehouse. In a story crammed with unlikely, outsized characters, he is perhaps the loudest. The 32-year-old had had an eventful upbringing in Limerick. At 12, he was sent to a reformatory for stealing a bunch of bananas. After moving to England in his late teens, he was packed off to borstal for handling stolen goods. From then, his criminal career escalated. In 1961, he posted a biscuit tin containing a home-made bomb to the address of a police officer he suspected of spreading false rumours about his sexuality. The device shot into the would-be victim’s ceiling, landing Bourke a seven-year sentence. What had attracted Randle, the vegetarian pacifist, to Bourke, apart from a shared acquaintance with Blake? “He was charming and intelligent,” Randle offered, by way of explanation. “Entertaining. He had a very good sense of humour.”

By 1963, Randle was back home in north London, now with a young family to support. But this period of domesticity was soon interrupted by a phone call from Bourke. It was mid-May, 1966, and he was living in a halfway house in west London. He said he was anxious to meet up. Delighted, if surprised, to hear from him, Randle told Bourke to make his way to his family home in Kentish Town. After a brief burst of reminiscence, Bourke grew sombre. Blake’s mood had deteriorated drastically in prison, he told Randle. Bourke had agreed to work on an escape plan and had made some progress, including getting a walkie-talkie to Blake. But financing remained an issue. The Randles immediately agreed to help.

After months of preparation, Randle telephoned Pottle, who had spent a brief spell working as Bertrand Russell’s secretary following his release from prison. Randle had something to discuss in person, he told his friend. Pottle understood straight away that it must be about Blake. They met that evening at Holborn Tube station, near Pottle’s printing press, and he agreed to help.

The success of the plot relied on a mix of courage and good fortune. Bourke sourced a getaway car, knitted a rope ladder and rented a bedsit near the prison under an assumed name. Randle drummed up some money from a small circle of well wishers in the peace movement. The escape itself passed with just one significant hitch: Blake broke his wrist on landing. A friendly doctor was rapidly procured, though it became apparent Blake would have to be moved before the bedsit’s landlady appeared for her weekly cleaning day. He then lived between a series of unsuitable safe houses before Pottle agreed to lodge him and an increasingly truculent Bourke in his Hampstead flat.

After discarding a series of ludicrous schemes — one had Blake using chemicals to black up in order to flee Britain under a false passport — a second-hand Commer camper van was procured and modified with a hidden compartment in which Blake could be stowed. Just before Christmas 1966, the Randles took what appeared to be a family road trip to Berlin. After days of relentless, amphetamine-fuelled driving, Blake was released from his hiding place into the freezing East German night. “He waved, and almost at once was lost in the darkness,” Randle recalled.

Meanwhile, in London, Bourke’s flair for self-sabotage was becoming apparent. Not only did he fail to dispose of the getaway car, but he rang a west London police station to report its precise whereabouts. During his time at Pottle’s flat, supposedly in hiding, he would regularly walk the streets of Hampstead, even accosting a local boy to post a photo of himself to the office of a tabloid newspaper. Later, it transpired that he’d made tape recordings of his and Blake’s walkie-talkie conversations, to be auctioned off to the News of the World.

Despite Bourke’s best efforts at conducting a one-man publicity campaign, the furore died down and normality gradually returned. Randle and Pottle went back to their busy lives devoted to various leftwing causes. “I remember when George Blake’s name came up when we were playing Trivial Pursuit,” recalled Pottle’s son Casper, when we spoke on the phone. “My parents started creasing up and I had no idea why.”

Blake’s and Bourke’s trajectories were less happy. Bourke followed Blake to Moscow in 1967 and the two men were placed in a lavish flat. There their relationship drifted into mutual resentment. Blake was “sullen, intolerant, arrogant and pompous”, Bourke later wrote, intimating that Blake was spying on him (almost certainly true) and even manoeuvring to have him assassinated (this more outlandish claim has never been proven). As for Blake, his flatmate’s grandstanding quickly lost its charm. “I soon began to resent him,” he wrote. “I thought at least he should do some housework.”

In 1968, Bourke returned to Ireland, riding a wave of self-generated publicity. By now, he was speaking openly to the press about his role in the escape. Attempts at extradition by the British government failed and Bourke was left to bask in his new celebrity. His sensational tell-all, The Springing of George Blake, appeared in 1970. It set out for the first time — with major lacunae and harsh criticism of Blake — the events of the escape and its aftermath. Michael and Anne Randle became “Michael and Anne Reynolds”, and Pat Pottle became the equally easy to decode “Pat Porter”.

“Why on earth did you use our actual Christian names?” Randle demanded on the first of several visits to Bourke in Ireland during the 1970s. Bourke replied he wasn’t “the simple, uncomplicated Irishman people . . . take me for”. But the book attracted positive reviews and surprisingly little blowback from the British state. Randle and Pottle spent months waiting for a knock at the door that never came. During Randle’s second visit, Bourke said he’d taken a call from a detective from Scotland Yard who’d told him they had long known about Randle and Pottle’s involvement in Blake’s escape and decided not to prosecute, not least because they were now leading “useful lives in the community”.

Sean Bourke died penniless and alone in January 1982, having spent his last years in a caravan on the coast of County Clare. The cause of death was heart failure, likely brought on by chronic alcoholism. Public interest in Randle and Pottle continued, with a series of books dropping more unsubtle hints about their involvement in the now historic escape. When The Sunday Times named the pair outright in early October 1987, Scotland Yard finally made contact. Randle and Pottle arrived at Holborn Police Station on October 30. Their “no comment” interviews were polite and perfunctory. A formal reopening of the enquiry into the Blake escape was announced shortly afterwards, on the urging of the rightwing press and 101 MPs who signed a motion backing the new investigation.

To set out their side of the story, and counter any suggestion that they or the wider peace movement had been in thrall to the KGB, Randle and Pottle co-authored a book, The Blake Escape: How We Freed George Blake — And Why. When the two men, now well into their fifties, were charged following its publication in 1989, the enormity of their situation finally began to sink in. The maximum sentence on charges of aiding the escape of a convicted prisoner, conspiring to harbour him and conspiring to prevent, hinder or interfere with his arrest ran up to nine years each. “I was really proud of my dad,” said Casper Pottle, “[but] when the police search the house it gets real, doesn’t it? We were teenagers, it makes an impression.”

Despite pressure to plead guilty, Randle and Pottle refused. They instead pleaded not guilty on grounds of “necessity of conscience”, a rarely invoked defence with its roots in 17th-century religious nonconformism. Its only previous modern usage was during the 1985 trial of Clive Ponting, a Ministry of Defence official who was tried and acquitted under the Official Secrets Act for revealing to an MP that government ministers had misled Parliament over the sinking of the Argentine warship General Belgrano during the Falklands war. For Randle and Pottle, Blake’s sentence had represented a moral outrage, and aiding his escape was therefore justified.

Pottle engaged Geoffrey Robertson, one of Britain’s leading human rights lawyers. “We [wanted] to argue that it was an abuse of process . . . [because] the authorities had known of their involvement since at least 1970,” Robertson explained when we spoke. In 1970, a detective named Rollo Watts had written a report outlining the case against Randle and Pottle, new evidence had revealed. The defence suspected that his report offered the truth as to why neither man had been brought to book. That it had simply been too humiliating for the state to admit that such a high-profile prisoner had been freed by a ramshackle group of outsiders.

The case moved to judicial review at the High Court in July 1990. The now retired Watts, a squat, nervous man with long, slightly out-of-time sideburns, was called to testify. He denied ever suggesting that the proposed prosecution of Randle and Pottle had been halted due to political pressure. When Watts left the witness box, two nameless men, likely intelligence agents, handed the judge a memo written by an MI5 officer in 1970. In it, the officer alleged Watts had openly said that “[prosecuting] Randle and Pottle . . . might be persecution — a big fish had got away so they were taking it out on the little fish.”

Still, the law pressed on. On November 15 1990, the “abuse of process” argument was dismissed out of hand. As Randle and Pottle’s new “conscience defence” was not formally recognised by the law, neither Robertson nor the other lawyers engaged by Randle could represent them beyond the preliminary hearings. They were on their own. The trial finally began on June 17 1991.

For the next nine days, the public gallery was packed with supporters, and journalists jostled for space on the press benches. The atmosphere was electric. “It might sound weird, when your father’s liberty is in the balance, but it was good fun,” recalled Casper Pottle. “There was a real camaraderie. We’d be spending every day together, going to the pub at lunch.” It was remarkable, he added, to see how seamlessly his father and Randle slipped back into the campaigning mode of their youth. “They’d built up so many contacts in the press. All sorts of people showed up,” he said. “Dave Gilmour, Harold Pinter, Alexei Sayle . . . I think Dad needed the adrenaline.” John Berger, another ex-member of the Committee of 100, sent a letter of support. “I wanted to tell you how happy I was to read [about you] . . . And to tell you how much you have my admiration,” he wrote. 

Randle and Pottle pressed on with the abuse-of-process argument, despite protestations from the judge. Randle appeared in court each day with a pile of legal texts procured from London’s public libraries, citing ever more obscure cases as defence. Pottle’s approach was more direct. “If you or the jury think [our defence is] a load of old codswallop, then you can say so . . . But at least give us the chance to say it.” Neither denied their role in the escape, which they considered a humanitarian act. “I refuse to believe that George Blake would have been better rotting in some English jail than living a semi-ordinary life back in Moscow,” Pottle told the jury.

I refuse to believe that George Blake would have been better rotting in some English jail than living a semi-ordinary life back in Moscow

Then he called his next witness: George Blake. Over video link, Blake stressed that there had been no KGB interference in his escape and that no money had changed hands. His appearance dominated the next day’s news cycle. “I think the jury were amazed [to hear from Blake]. Almost stunned. No one seemed to be thinking, ‘Oh, how awful we’ve got this bloody spy coming from Moscow,’” said Richard Norton-Taylor, who covered the trial for The Guardian.

Despite the outpouring of support, both defendants fully expected a guilty verdict. “I remember [someone] asking what they’d take with them to prison if they were convicted,” said Norton-Taylor. “Michael said Ulysses. Pat said rolling tobacco. That summed them up.” In his closing speech, Pottle said he could understand the moral indignation about Blake’s espionage, but that Blake’s original sentence had never been about justice. Its severity could at least partly be explained by the fact that Blake was “not of the ‘old school’, not ‘one of us’. He was a foreigner and half-Jewish to boot,” Pottle told the jury. “You are 12 individuals with minds of your own . . . we think what we did was right. If you think the same, then obviously you will not find us guilty.” Then he quoted Bertrand Russell: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest.”

On a damp midweek morning in February this year, I travelled to Inner London Crown Court. I made my way to the shabby public gallery overlooking Court Four, which was packed with supporters of five climate activists charged with criminal damage after smashing a door at JPMorgan’s London headquarters in 2021 during a protest against the bank’s status as the world’s largest investor in fossil fuel expansion.

In March 2023, two of the accused had served seven-week stints in prison after flouting a court order not to invoke the climate crisis during an unrelated trial. The judge had banned them from explaining to the jury that they had been protesting to raise awareness of climate change and fuel poverty. The past few years have witnessed a steady spate of acquittals in climate activism cases involving defendants who have deployed the same defence of conscience used by Michael Randle and Pat Pottle in the 1990s. “[The] Randle and Pottle trial has been an inspiration for the work we’ve been doing,” Tim Crosland, an Extinction Rebellion legal adviser, told me. “Juries have an absolute right to acquit . . . [that depends] on understanding why people did what they did.” 

This rash of acquittals has been a source of embarrassment for the state. Judges have taken to banning any mention of climate change, fuel poverty or even the history of the civil rights movement, and jail sentences have been passed down for contempt of court for activists who have refused to comply. In one case, government lawyers pursued Trudi Warner, a 68-year-old retired social worker, for contempt of court. She had stood alone outside Inner London Crown Court during the March 2023 trial involving the same defendants I’d seen in court. “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience,” read her placard. This April, the High Court finally threw out the charges against her. “[It can] have a chilling effect”, said Crosland. “If people hear the story they say, ‘No, that can’t have happened’. Yes it did.”

The judge’s summing-up on June 26 1991 began with reference to Randle and Pottle’s ready admission of their guilt. Whether or not their being taken to trial after decades of inaction was an abuse of process was not a matter for the jury to concern themselves with, he said. Though he could not order a conviction, he implored the jury to “loyally honour my ruling on the law whatever view you may have formed of the defendants”. The jury retired just before noon, and Randle and Pottle waited in the court canteen. After an hour of inaction, they made their way to the pub for what they expected to be their final meal as free men.

At 3pm, the announcement filtered through the court. The jury had returned their verdict. “If you can cope, so can I,” Anne Randle whispered in her husband’s ear. In the same dock they had stood in 30 years earlier, before their fateful spell at Wormwood Scrubs, Randle and Pottle peered at the jury for any clues. Silence descended across the courtroom. “Members of the jury, in the respect of count one . . . do you find the defendants guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” came the foreman’s reply. The verdict was greeted by a wall of noise. Randle’s sons burst into tears. Somewhere from the back of the court came a shout straight from the football terraces. “It was my brother,” laughed Casper Pottle when I asked him about it. “All the accounts have said he shouted ‘Come on you Spurs’, but he’s a Queen’s Park Rangers fan. It was ‘Come on you Rs!’”

Randle and Pottle were found not guilty on every count of the indictment. Outside the court, the jurors embraced the pair they’d just acquitted. “Thank God for the jury system and the independence of jurors,” a jubilant Randle told assembled reporters. Passers-by offered their congratulations, as did Blake when he telephoned from Moscow that evening during the raucous celebrations. Not everyone was pleased. “A Bad Day for British Justice,” stormed The Telegraph. “Stinkers of the Old Bailey,” fumed The Sun.

Norton-Taylor summed up the prevailing opinion on what became known as the “perverse verdict”. By the early 1990s, the controversy of Blake’s treachery and escape had begun to feel like a relic of the past. The cold war was nominally over and the Berlin Wall had fallen. “That atmosphere had changed, really. Juries can smell oppression. The state knew who it was years before.” Even those unsympathetic to Blake didn’t doubt the sincerity of Randle and Pottle. “They were a brilliant double act really. It was one of the reasons they were acquitted,” said Casper Pottle. “It was a DIY jailbreak and a DIY defence. I’ve always thought those were contributing factors.”

Some regard Randle and Pottle’s acquittal as evidence of a more decent epoch in British justice. A time when fair-mindedness could trump relentless pressure from the tabloid press. “Perhaps the biggest heroine of the case was English justice itself and its tradition of independent juries and equality before the law,” wrote Thomas Grant in his history of the Old Bailey. Still, the lack of an earlier prosecution had less to do with high mindedness, than a desire to avoid humiliation. Randle and Pottle’s acquittal was down to the jury and not the beneficence of the state.

George Blake died in December 2020, aged 98, having lived long enough to see his reputation move from highly controversial to cold war curio. Randle and Pottle continued to take an interest in politics and protest. “My father was political right up until his death,” said Casper Pottle. “He kept that anarchist streak. He always kept his own mind. I remember just before the trial, it was during the Gulf war, I went down to a demo with some friends from school. We sat down in the road by Parliament Square. A policeman told us to move and we did.” Later, he returned to find that his parents had joined the same protest. When they refused to move, they were both arrested and taken to the police cells for processing.

Francisco Garcia is the author of “We All Go Into the Dark: the Hunt for Bible John”, published by Mudlark/HarperCollins

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Q) FLIXBUS is refusing to refund me and my wife £115 after it let us board a coach in Slovenia travelling to Germany instead of Croatia.

We were waiting in Ljubljana, Slovenia for a coach to Umag in Croatia – the service 943.

1

When a 943 service finally showed up half an hour late, we boarded and asked if it was the right bus and the driver nodded, scanned our tickets and let us board.

But we later found out it was going to Munich, Germany, 350 miles in the wrong direction.

Flixbus has refused to take responsibility, but I feel the driver should have told us it was the wrong bus when we gave him our tickets to board.

Can you help us get some compensation?

Stuart McCulloch, Edinburgh

A)WHAT a nightmare you had when you realised you were on a bus heading to Munich, Germany, 350 miles away from your intended destination of Umag in Croatia.

You arrived at Llublana bus station 20 minutes early and waited for 50 minutes before a Flixbus coach labelled service 943, the service you needed, finally showed up.

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They scanned your tickets before allowing you to board, without mentioning it was a 943 service going in the other direction.

A little while into the journey, you realised you were going the wrong way and asked the driver, who then confirmed you were on the wrong bus.

You got off the coach in Bled, Slovenia, around 55km North of Ljubljana, and contacted Flixbus for help – but no one responded.

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Having already lost the £43 you paid for your original tickets, you forked out another £75 for the new tickets, plus £10 to get back to Ljubljana from Bled.

You were hopeful you would at least get a refund for the original unused tickets.

But when you eventually got through to Flixbus, it said your case was “an exception, not the standard” and refused to take any responsibility for what happened.

It eventually agreed to refund you £13 after deducting various fees. But this meant you were still £115 out of pocket.

When I spoke with Flixbus, it acknowledged that the driver should have told you it was the wrong 943 service when you asked and showed your tickets.

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But, it has now agreed to refund all your extra travel expenses, plus your original tickets in full, amounting to £115 extra compensation.

A spokesperson for FlixBus said: “We apologise that the passengers ended up travelling in the wrong direction, as their tickets should have been more thoroughly checked by the driver. 

“FlixBus acknowledges the inconvenience caused and has offered a full refund for the original tickets purchased and the additional tickets needed for travel.”

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On a weekday morning in late September, an hour and a half from Tokyo off a side-road near the town of Sakura, the ticket queue for the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art is long. Cars wait along a cedar-lined lane for a spot in the second overflow parking zone. The gift shop has been so overwhelmed by customers in recent days that management has shut its doors. By 11:45am, the digital screen outside the museum’s Belvedere Italian restaurant declares the waiting time for a table is now 181 minutes; a special notice on the website recommends bringing a packed lunch instead.

The museum has said it will close in early 2025, and thousands of art lovers, in their stampede to the Chiba countryside, can sense an emergency. Large parts of corporate Japan can sense something far, far more alarming.

The unfolding saga of this comparatively obscure museum — and of the hundreds of artworks owned by the listed chemicals company behind it — is also an unfolding saga of corporate Japan and what version of shareholder capitalism the country as a whole wants to subject itself to. A belated reckoning now looks to be rearing back up from the murky late 1980s, when banks encouraged Japanese company founders to borrow wildly against what were then soaring domestic real estate values.

It is a first, potentially trailblazing instance of a company revealing the extent of its art collection under explicitly governance-driven pressure. Of the 754 works in the Kawamura collection, 384 are owned by DIC — pretty much all of the most famous works belong to the company and thus their ownership is now caught in an ideological limbo.

One argument — now more visibly gathering steam as Japanese companies are held to ever higher standards by their investors — is that art is simply an asset of a company that they, the shareholders own, and should be treated like any other asset.

The counter is that however compelling the argument above, companies have a wider societal function than simply service to shareholders, and that their asset portfolios should be assessed accordingly. That same argument holds that Japan, as a whole, has benefited from this much broader interpretation, and would be the poorer if everything were subjected to the hard rules of shareholder capitalism. The debate, raging around the vast expanse of “non-core” assets and business ventures maintained by Japanese companies, is now at the heart of a tectonic structural shift.

Funds and art experts suspect that an unknowable trove, technically owned by listed companies, has made its way into private homes

One of the nation’s most exquisite dirty secrets — the ambiguous ownership of highly valuable art, the exploitation of listed companies to protect generational wealth and habitual asset-mingling between families and public companies — has broken the surface after lying relatively undisturbed for decades. In this instance, it has been exposed by Oasis Management, a notoriously catalytic shareholder activist. But it is part of a broader, inexorable-looking trend.

“Japanese companies were told they were worth billions. It was funny money, so they did funny things,” says Toby Rodes of Kaname Capital, a fund manager whose strategy includes delving into the art collections hidden on the Tokyo stock market, using their existence as a signal of more profound governance shortcomings.

There is no particular allegation that anything illegal has taken place — simply that the Japanese market has been supernaturally tolerant of blurred lines. In his particular focus on art, Rodes is a rarity, but the hunt for governance failures and the potential returns that come with repairing those has attracted scores of activist and value funds to Japan.

Not all of the buying in the late 1980s and early 1990s was ostentatious. But the escapades that the era fuelled became the stuff of legend. Japanese company bosses — in some cases with bankruptcy lurking quite soon in their future — set jaw-dropping records for purchases of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, Renoir’s “Bal du moulin de la Galette”, Picasso’s “Les Noces de Pierrette” and many other gems.

The bursting of the bubble triggered a quiet, bad-debted and, to many, face-losing outflow of Japan’s art throughout the downturn of the late 1990s. Some instances, such as the efforts to trace the whereabouts of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr Gachet” after it fell into the hands of creditors, have been multi-decade international mysteries. But these outflows were not, by any means, a full clearance sale. Across corporate Japan, major works accumulated in the heyday still loom over the rarefied exclusivity of boardrooms.

It is a subject about which very few in the art-dealing world like to talk on the record; often because they now see that governance improvements in Japan and the enforcement of transparency on listed companies could actually flood “lost” art on to an illiquid market, and reveal more of its murky past.

$500mn (¥74bn)Estimated value of DIC’s Kawamura Rothko collection

¥11.2bnDIC’s formal book value for its entire art collection

Where is it now? Funds and art experts suspect that an unknowable trove, technically owned by listed companies, has made its way into the private homes of their founders or the founders’ descendants. Masterpieces almost certainly sit, undeclared, in company-owned warehouses around the country, art dealers say. VIP visitors to the Tokyo headquarters of Nomura may find themselves sitting at a table with a Monet at one end and a Chagall at the other. Special guests of Marubeni may catch a glimpse of Botticelli’s “La Bella Simonetta”.

“I will never forget when I stumbled across a ‘museum’ that doubled as the executive floor of a Japanese broadcaster,” said one veteran US-based fund manager. “Being protected from a change of control by legal regulation, the entrenched management team had a penchant for very fine works of art. The team escorting me to the elevator after a meeting got nervous when I paused in front of a Cézanne.”

Now, in an era when urgent corporate governance reforms are being ordered by both the Japanese government and Tokyo Stock Exchange, when greater transparency is being demanded and shareholder activism has become more emboldened, the debate around these assets threatens a painful rethink of Japan’s relationship between companies, their founders, society and shareholders.

Despite its somewhat awkward location in the sticks, the Kawamura Memorial museum, elegantly constructed at the end of Japan’s 1980s bubble era and set in gardens dotted with a Henry Moore and other sculptures, has plenty to justify a visit. Some would argue, excessively so: a financial anomaly hiding in plain sight for decades.

The collection was assembled by the founding family of the Dainippon Ink and Chemicals Corporation (DIC) from the 1970s. Whatever it lacks in thematic coherence it more than makes up for in stunning reminders of just how acquisitive Japan became at the peak of its financial powers.

It is no coincidence that the museum opened in 1990 — the year in which, according to FT data analysis, imports of paintings to Japan hit an all-time peak of almost ¥500bn ($3.3bn), or more than 10 times higher than in 1985. By 1992, the value had plummeted again to ¥34bn ($229mn).

Inside the museum’s softly lit galleries hang works by Matisse, Chagall, Ernst, Monet, Picasso and Renoir. There is a remarkable Pollock, two works by Twombly and a special alcove housing Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man in a Broad-Brimmed Hat”.

But Kawamura’s most valuable show-stopper is upstairs, in a dedicated room walled with seven panels by Mark Rothko, from a collection originally painted for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. The huge works are widely seen as part of the most important commission Rothko ever undertook. The auction record for just one Rothko painting stands at $86.9mn. According to art experts consulted by investors, the ones in Kawamura might, together, be worth well over half a billion dollars.

Despite the qualities of this extraordinary collection, it has been on display here for 34 years without ever generating more than a modest stream of visitors at an average rate of just a few hundred people a day.

But on August 27 the board of indebted, unprofitable DIC, which owns the museum and much of the art inside, made a surprise announcement. Because of the relationship between the company and the museum, and because of the “opinions expressed by investors”, said the statement, it had now become impracticable to maintain and operate the museum in its current state. The museum, it declared, will “temporarily close” from January 2025. It then, on September 30, sent out a second notice saying that it would postpone the closure until March 2025 “taking into account visitor numbers” since its earlier notice.

Crucially, though, the DIC statement addressed one of the great enigmas that have hung, permanently, over the museum. Until now, the company has never specified how much of the art it displays in its museum it actually owns, and how much is owned by the family. It has, accordingly, not ascribed a precise market-to-market value to the art in the published accounts.

But in its August 27 statement the company came partially clean. Of the 754 works in the collection, it said, 384 are owned by the company — and thus, activists would argue, by the shareholders. DIC put a formal book value of just Y11.2bn ($77mn) on the company’s art — an extremely low reckoning of its potential value were the art to come on to the market.

Several things have happened since that bombshell. The first is that many Japanese have seen the news, panicked that the days of a great national treasure are now numbered — even though most had not previously bothered to visit — and decided that they must trek over there in their thousands. A second is that the decision has been vehemently challenged. Prominent “DON’T CLOSE IT!” signs have popped up along the roads around the museum, and an online petition against the closure appeared on the local municipality’s website. As of last weekend, it had more than 47,000 signatures.

Japanese companies have long cited a grander purpose and duty to multiple stakeholders. They argued that Japanese society has benefited

The third and arguably most life-changing effect for Japan has been to focus the attention of investors on how many other DICs there may be lurking around the country. Hedge funds that now specialise in this sort of socially fraught treasure hunt, and have spoken to the FT over recent months, suspect that there are dozens of companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that bear a close resemblance.

The background to DIC’s decision to close the museum was more than a decade in the making. The country’s first governance code setting best practice for companies was introduced in 2015, and was accompanied by a stewardship code that set out the obligations on investors to hold companies’ managements to account. Since then, the situation has begun to change. Companies have gradually begun to raise governance standards, even when they have not fully accepted the premise of shareholder primacy. Well-known shareholder activists, such as ValueAct Capital and Elliott, have focused heavily on the opportunities in Japan, while smaller funds, such as Oasis, 3D and the group headed by Yoshiaki Murakami, have managed to run a series of hard-hitting campaigns.

There was — and still is — a great deal to fix. Japanese boards were not diverse, were very rarely controlled or overseen by a majority of independent directors, and shareholder activism was decried as a barbaric western practice. This, in effect, conferred huge freedom on the managements of listed companies to run them as they pleased, rather than more directly in the interests of shareholders.

To doubly secure their freedom, Japanese companies created great networks of shareholdings in other, friendly listed companies on the understanding that those blocs of shares would never vote against management.

And to triple-lock it in, Japanese companies constructed a collective narrative that they existed for a higher purpose than simply expanding shareholder value and maximising profits. Long before BlackRock’s Larry Fink reversed years of investment dogma and began urging a more responsible recalibration of corporate focus and a broader definition of corporate “purpose”, Japanese companies were comfortably citing their grander purpose and sense of duty to multiple stakeholders. They have argued, forcefully, that Japanese society has benefited from this, no matter how inefficiently they have deployed capital.

An obvious question, now asked with ever more frequency and consequence, is why should so many — 3,951 at the last count — Japanese companies be listed at all, given the lengths they have gone to avoid the structures, scrutiny and potential pressure that comes with being listed?

Several can see the governance writing on the wall. Within the past year, the managements of two companies still closely tied to their founding families have decided to undertake management buyouts and de-list from the exchange — away from activists, governance strictures and the general scrutiny now in prospect. They are Benesse, the education company whose founding family established the famous Benesse Art Site on Naoshima island, and Taisho Pharmaceutical, whose founding family’s art is displayed in the Uehara Museum and include works by Cézanne, Renoir and Corot.

“The common thread [is that] both company founders are art collectors and were likely feeling the pressure of needing to come clean on the conflicts of interest and poor governance that put the art on the walls,” said one private equity executive in Tokyo who knows of at least half a dozen other companies contemplating a similar move.

The key to understanding what is happening, says Rodes, co-founder of Kaname Capital, is Japan’s long history with extremely high levels of inheritance tax — a levy of around 50 per cent on large estates that can, in theory, wipe out family wealth over a few generations.

The stock market, in this light, has been abused as a means of securing generational wealth

One of the most popular ways to deal with this was for families to list their companies and hold on to significant stakes so that there was always a cache of shares that could be liquidated to pay the taxman. The stock market, in that light, has been abused as a means of securing generational wealth, rather than as a mechanism for growing good companies. Families would maintain their control over the listed companies’ boards by installing favourable directors.

Because of this extremely common pattern, say Rodes and others, families came to see the balance sheets of listed companies as, in effect, their own asset. It was a critical psychological leap that lies right at the heart of the corporate governance problems that investors are now shining the brightest of lights upon.

“Looking at the art collections is one way of bringing bad governance to the surface,” says Rodes. “It is our way of saying, ‘We know what you did’. Art is the governance sledgehammer. Could the companies do more with these notoriously illiquid assets? Absolutely.”

Joji Kaneko, a visitor to the Kawamura museum who has travelled more than 400km by car from Nagoya, is now admiring a wall of art by Frank Stella. “I’m here because I’ve heard that this museum is going to close in January and this could be my last chance to see everything here,” Kaneko says. “It’s a sad thing, but I guess it’s just something that can’t be helped. Money always wins in these situations, doesn’t it?”

The statement by DIC in which it announced the closure of its museum referred to “the opinions of investors” — euphemistically, the questions raised by certain shareholders, including Oasis Management, around whether the corporate ownership of art can be justified when the company is heavily indebted and the Tokyo Stock Exchange itself is calling for listed companies to demonstrate greater capital efficiency.

Beyond the polite protest posters outside the Kawamura museum, there is a low-level outrage that shareholders should be able to force companies to behave differently than they have done in the past. But change is in the air.

“Owning art and pretending you are doing God’s work is crazy. Boards can no longer pretend there is nothing to see here,” says Rodes.

Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief. Additional reporting by Dan Clark

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PENSIONERS are in for a windfall next year, as weekly State Pension payments are due to rise by around 4%.

But how much extra you’ll get in pounds and pence depends on whether you receive the old version of the benefit or the newer full state pension.

1

How much will the state pension increase by next year?

Increases to the State Pension are determined by something called the Triple Lock, which was introduced by the Conservative and Lib Dem coalition government in 2010.

It promises that each year, payments will go up by the higher of:

• Inflation, according to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI)
• Average wage increases 
• 2.5%.

This year, preliminary figures from the Office for National Statistics, show that earnings increased by 4% in the relevant month (which is July).

By comparison, the September inflation figures came in at around 2.2%, significantly lower than earnings growth.

That means that state pensions should rise by the earnings figure. However, the final decision will be made by the Work and Pensions Secretary, usually around the time of the Autumn Statement, which is on October 30.

If the official earnings or inflation figures are revised, the amount the state pension increases by could also change.

For people on the new state pension

Currently, the new full state pension is £221.20 a week, which works out as £11,502.40 a year.

If pension payments do go up by 4%, that means weekly payments will go up to £230.05 a week, which works out as £11,962.50 a year.

That’s an increase of just over £460 per annum. However, that number only applies to people who get the full new state pension. 

To get the full state pension, you need to have 35 years of national insurance contributions. 

If you’re only getting some of the new state pension, for instance because you have less than 35 years of NI credits but more than 10, then your payment increase will be less. You’ll still get a 4% uplift, but the total amount will continue to be lower.

For instance, someone with just 20 years of National Insurance contributions or credits would get around £126.40 a week. Per year, that works out as £6,572.80.

If that increases by 4% in line with the current earnings data, then it will rise to £6,835.71. So, someone would be better off by just under £263 a year. 

You can check your national insurance record on gov.uk. To calculate what state pension payment you’d receive, divide £221.20 by 35 and then multiply that by the number of years of contributions you expect to have. 

For people on the old basic state pension

If you’re a man born before 6 April 1951 or a woman born before 6 April 1953, you’ll get the basic state pension instead. 

This currently pays just £169.50 a week, which adds up to £8,814 a year. If it’s boosted by 4%, the annual payments would rise £9,167.60 – which is an increase of over £353.

To get the full basic State Pension you still need a certain number of qualifying years of National Insurance.

If you’re a man, you usually need:

• 30 qualifying years if you were born between 1945 and 1951
• 44 qualifying years if you were born before 1945

If you’re a woman you usually need:

• 30 qualifying years if you were born between 1950 and 1953
• 39 qualifying years if you were born before 1950

If you don’t have enough qualifying years, then your basic State Pension will be less than £169.50 per week. 

If you qualify for additional state pension

Lots of people who get the basic state pension, also qualify for the additional state pension. This is extra money on top of the basic payment.

To qualify you need to be either:

• a man born before 6 April 1951
• a woman born before 6 April 1953

There is no fixed amount and how much you get depends on your national insurance record, your income, and whether you contracted out of the schemes.

But NI Direct says that the maximum amount anyone can get is £218.39 per week, not including the state pension top up. This means that between your basic state pension and your additional payments, you could be getting significantly more than the new full state pension. 

The Additional State Pension is made up of 3 schemes, and you might have contributed to more than one of them.

For instance, you might have been eligible for the State Second Pension if you were employed and earned over a certain threshold or claimed certain benefits between 2002 and 2016. 

Equally, people could choose to top up their basic State Pension between 12 October 2015 and 5 April 2017. If you did this, you will get some additional state pension.

Finally, those people who were employed between 1978 and 2002 may have benefitted from the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS).

You do not have to do anything to claim the Additional State Pension. If you’re eligible, you’ll automatically get it when you claim your State Pension.

Whatever amount you’re given should also rise by 4% from next April. 

“When a bird flies through this garden, it doesn’t know it’s not allowed to go anywhere so it just goes everywhere,” says Es Devlin, tracing an imaginary flight with her hand across the sunlit space. “And we would have once been like that, before the Enclosure Acts and all that happened. So I think we long for the commons. We long to be reminded of systems greater than ourselves.”

That sense of connection vibrates through much of Devlin’s work. Artist, writer and stage designer, she — a little like that bird — defies borders. Many know the 53-year-old for her theatre designs — wonderful, often kinetic sets that sculpt space and animate the ideas of a play: The Lehman Trilogy, encased in a revolving glass cuboid, has just returned to London; her stunning, monumental set for the National Theatre’s new Coriolanus has the play unfold in a museum of antique statues and treasures — a silent testimony to imperial might.

For others, her name is synonymous with vast arena designs — sending Miley Cyrus sliding down a giant pink tongue; framing Stormzy in a veil of rain at the Brit Awards; wrapping the audience for U2’s residency at the giant Las Vegas Sphere in a gorgeous kaleidoscope of images of the natural world. Certain leitmotifs run like connecting rivers through her work. A line of light cutting through darkness derives from her earliest memory: falling into water as a tiny child; cubes and spheres, reflecting an endless fascination with fundamental forms such as the circle, the triangle and the square, pop up frequently.

But underpinning all this is her work as an artist. She’s always regarded design work as art in itself: for her a stage set is a protagonist. And for the past decade, her visual arts practice has soared to the fore, powering her output, as she’s created multiple exhibitions, films and installations that are themselves concerned with tracing connections. Her work for art galleries — often durational, often involving music and interaction — builds on “having sat in the dark with an audience for 30 years”.

“I just enjoy it all, I really do,” she says. “If you were Robert Hooke [the 17th-century English polymath] and you spent your day drawing creatures through a microscope, then you helped Christopher Wren do the engineering on St Paul’s Cathedral and then you probably wrote a motet in the evening, you would just be practising everything that you could. And that’s always how I’ve approached it.”

That porosity is expressed even in her home in south London, where the studio spills into the living space and the living space into the garden, the large glass doors open wide on the warm afternoon on which we meet so that the threshold seems to melt away. Life and work, outside and inside tumble over one another: one of her cats picks its way through the stacks of drawings and paint pots.

Right now that house is occupied by dozens of huge charcoal and chalk portraits, rising metres high, gazing out at you from the walls and floor. These are the drawings for her new installation, Congregation. All the sitters arrived in the UK as forcibly displaced people — some recently, some in childhood, many after considerable trauma.

In the finished work, mounted in several tiers inside St Mary le Strand Church in central London, they will form an assembly of gift-bringers, each person holding an empty box that will illuminate with film, like animated stained glass windows. The content is co-authored by the sitters and is accompanied, at dusk each evening, by a free choral performance. It will be, says Devlin, a “collective portrait of those who bring their gifts to London”. “The boxes will behave like mini theatres. So it’s drawing the theatre practice into the art practice. They really are hard to separate at this point.”

The idea emerged in 2022. Devlin was struck by contradictory public and political attitudes towards displaced people from different countries, the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees contrasting with harsh rhetoric about an “invasion” of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel. Working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, she invited 50 individuals to collaborate with her and sit for a portrait. For the first 45 minutes, she encountered them as strangers, drawing only what she saw. Then, after a conversation about their lives, she would return to the drawing. That process was significant — in part an attempt to root out her own biases and assumptions. 

“I put music on to stop us both talking — the Max Richter reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons — and I asked them to look right into my eyes. And then we’d stop and they would tell me about themselves.”

The results were revealing. She recalls one sitter, Maya, who arrived in the UK, aged 16, from Damascus.

“I had never drawn anyone in hijab before. My own overlays and associations were almost like static interference. So I’m thinking about demure Renaissance sculptures of women and I’m trying to really do justice to this beautiful curve of fabric and how it bounces off the face. And then she tells me her story and she’s a commercial airline pilot. And the picture is just aching at me, going ‘What were you thinking of! It was her watch you should have been looking at, her big chunky black pilot watch.’”

So did the portrait change? “Totally. I became obsessed by the strength of her arm. All my other biases about what pilots must be like came in.”

She laughs. We’re sitting beneath the trees at the end of the garden. Devlin, in a sunshine yellow top and white cargo pants, is as vividly present as her work. She often wears yellow, I observe.

“It’s a good colour,” she replies, good-humouredly. “The day goes well when I’m wearing yellow. And I try to pack so much into my waking life that not having any choice of clothes has made my life so much simpler.”

Even sitting still there’s a compressed energy to her. Director Lyndsey Turner, with whom Devlin often works, describes her approach as both “forensic and associative”. She’ll drill into the meaning of a word, but equally a chance encounter as she cycles around London might find its way into her work. One of her great skills is to craft those connections into sculpted experiences for an audience: a way of feeling themselves to be part of a greater whole.

In her set for The Lehman Trilogy, the three actors build the world of the play — shop counters, desks, towering skyscrapers — from grey cardboard boxes like those used by Lehman employees to remove their belongings when the company collapsed in 2008. It’s an approach that matches the actors’ ingenuity to that of the three Lehman brothers. But, importantly for Devlin, it also allows the audience “to be the set designer”.

“It’s magical to feel everybody reading one small cardboard box and in their mind creating their own world,” she says. “In the theatre you know that you’re part of making the work. I think that’s why you feel quite alive when you leave.”

She views audiences as temporary societies: communities where a slight shift in perspective is possible. In the theatre, or in a piece like Congregation, that might translate into empathy for others. In the installation Come Home Again, a “choral sculpture” of drawings and sound erected outside Tate Modern in 2022 to celebrate 243 endangered species common to London, it became about decentring the human: urgently reconsidering our place in existence and our relationship with the planet.

So what might AI contribute to this discourse, with its potential to mimic or even outstrip human intelligence? Devlin has used AI creatively — her Pavilion for Expo 2020 in Dubai was a huge cone-shaped structure that displayed a constant stream of verse — collective poems generated by an algorithm from words suggested by visitors. She’s both pragmatic and philosophical.

“I think artists engaging with it makes sense — rather than just being eaten,” she says. “Yes, be fearful, but also see where these things could really work with us.

“And maybe we’re not the centre of intelligence. There are intelligences that are beyond our own all around us. The intelligence in each of these plants, for instance. There are so many things that are other than us.”

‘Congregation’, to October 9, unrefugees.org.uk; ‘The Lehman Trilogy’, Gillian Lynne Theatre, to January 5, lwtheatres.co.uk; ‘Coriolanus’, to November 9, nationaltheatre.org.uk

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SUMY

In July, I visit a special forces unit near Sumy in the north-east. A group of soldiers has returned from across the Russian border — wet, dirty, tired, yet satisfied. They review their GoPro and drone footage, read books, watch movies, eat and rest on couches, cleaning their weapons and chatting. I spend four days with them, watching them train and have fun by the nearby lake, joining in their volleyball games.

One day, during a game, we hear a distant but powerful noise. The servicemen take a quick glance up, and one of my teammates turns to me: “It’s Himars,” he says, referring to a rocket launcher used to strike Russian targets. “Come on, hit the ball!” A few days later, back in Kyiv, I discover that two of the guys I’d spent time with at the lake were killed on their next mission.

SUMY DRONE UNIT

At the top of a hill in a field of high fresh green wheat, a drone falls. It is not easy to find — the men have to use another drone to spot where it landed. These drones had been used a couple of days before, during the mission across the border. They imitate attacks to drive the Russian servicemen inside while sappers lay mines to cut off access to the main road.

KHARKIV CONTROL CENTRE

The Russian army occupied a piece of land in the north of the Kharkiv region in May. In the city of Kharkiv, there is an unremarkable building with shuttered windows. The entrance looks abandoned, but the door opens from inside when certain people want to enter. This is a base for the Khartia Brigade, a branch of the National Guard that was founded in Kharkiv in 2022. Inside, there is a drone workshop and an observation point to manage drones in the battlefield. Several large TV screens show around 20 video streams at the same time. There’s an active operation going on. Footage of the cratered soil being hit by thousands of projectiles moves slowly across the muted screens.

KHARKIV DRONE UNIT

The next day, late in the evening, I am taken by the large drones unit to where they are stationed. It is about 5km from the front line. We are meant to arrive and leave in the dark. The car looks like one from Mad Max, with steel sheets attached to it and several large radio-electronic warfare pylons on the roof. Because the front line is so near, the car speeds along the rough, narrow roads at more than 120kph, despite the darkness. At one point, we nearly crash into a tank. In the village, the guys set up antennas and a drone, then quickly move into a basement for launch. The Vampire drone is loud. Above us, the starry sky buzzes with different types of drones.

TSYRKUNY

In the middle of a hot day, we arrive at a sappers’ point, close to the front line. The sappers work with a huge range of ammunition, adapting them to attach to different types of drones. The ground is littered with explosive devices ready to be used. Some are homemade, from plastic bottles, some have been printed on a 3D printer. There are parts of an RPG-7 rocket launcher, some thermobaric vacuum bombs and other grenades. The sapper works carefully and confidently. He doesn’t talk much until I show him what I’ve drawn. Then he smiles.

Sergiy Maidukov’s work has appeared in the FT Magazine, as well as The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He was born in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, which is currently occupied by Russia and its militant proxies. Maidukov has been working with servicemen to cover the conflict

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