Book of the week: We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

In a ‘deeply impressive book’, Higgins explains the power of his ‘intelligence agency for the people’ 

Eliot Higgins is founder of online investigation website Bellingcat (Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)
Eliot Higgins is founder of online investigation website Bellingcat
(Image credit: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

Patricia Lockwood is a young American poet and memoirist whose elegantly witty tweets – “@ParisReview So is Paris any good or not” – have earned her the moniker “poet laureate of Twitter”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in the New Statesman. Now she has produced the “best novel I have read about the internet”. In its first half, we are taken “inside the head” of a woman who leads a very online existence: she posts incessantly on the “portal” (the novel’s word for the internet), and travels the world speaking about digital culture. But half way through, she is “wrenched out” of this by the news that her sister’s baby has a rare congenital condition. This turns what might have become an “in-joke for media liberals” into a deeper story.

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