‘PLEASING people is my chief vice as a man and my main virtue as a reporter,’ writes Andrew O’Hagan in one of the three novella-length essays in this collection. Whatever trouble it might cause in his private life, it is an essential tool as an essayist, gaining him access to people and places off bounds to almost everyone else. Personality can only take one so far as a writer, however. As one of the most prominent and authoritative essayists in the country, O’Hagan demonstrates the cardinal skills of the genre: a boundless curiosity, an eye for novelistic detail, and a lucid, effortless prose style that is neither matey nor formal.

Previously published in the London Review of Books, these pieces — Ghosting, The Invention of Ronald Pinn and The Satoshi Affair —are unrelated in subject matter apart from the line they walk between reality and fantasy, between the old order in which printed and recorded facts could be pinned down, and today’s liminal online world where identities are fluid, as is the truth.

The Secret Life opens with O’Hagan’s account of the months he spent with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, fruitlessly ghosting his memoir. Initially, when he met Assange, he was holed up in a friend’s mansion in Norfolk, reporting daily to the local police station as he awaited his extradition hearing. By story’s end, he is ensconced in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, surrounded by empty takeaway cartons. In between lies an illuminating account of what makes this crusader tick.

When Jamie Byng, publisher of Canongate, first mooted the project, O’Hagan leapt at the offer. He quickly gained Assange’s trust, but he also soon realised that the man was incapable of sharing his inner life except in rare flashes. He had, it was clear, no intention of cooperating with the writing of his memoir, despite repeated assurances to the contrary. The pith of this essay lies less in the gradual collapse of one of the most trumpeted publishing deals in recent times, excruciating though that is, and more in what O’Hagan gleans about the quixotic and largely unfathomable subject of his slowly vanishing book.

Another infuriatingly slippery and ultimately pitiable figure is the subject of the baroque and baffling The Satoshi Affair. In this, the least accessible of the essays for those of us not at ease in the digital jungle, O’Hagan enters deeper into the web’s murkier chambers. After a scandal in which Australian computer whizz Craig Wright comes under police/FBI scrutiny, suspected as being the creator of the digital currency Bitcoin, O’Hagan is contracted to write Wright’s account of his involvement in this most intangible of currencies. The key question is whether Wright is indeed the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, whose fans view him as a demi-god. If so, he runs the risk of being charged with assisting terrorists who have used bitcoin to buy weapons.

The complications of this story are manifold, not helped by Wright’s intense paranoia. What comes over plainly, however, is the shifting environment in which so-called ‘cypherpunks’ like Wright function. It is a sphere alien to those who cling to analogue certainties as limpets to the rocks.

There are secrets of an entirely other order in The Invention of Ronald Pinn. Following the furore of undercover police taking the names of dead children to create a covert identity, O’Hagan ventured into the swamplands of false personae. “An immersion in wrongdoing and illegality would be necessary to tell it from the absolute centre,” he writes, as he takes the name of Ronald Pinn, who died at the age of 20 in 1984, from a headstone in a London cemetery. With the aid of too-easily obtained birth and death certificates, he proceeds to create a “legend” for the new Pinn. Soon, he is able to buy drugs and explore guns sites on the dark web. It is an act of imaginative exploration, pushing the boundaries of decency, as well as the law.

O’Hagan’s willingness to put himself into morally ambiguous situations allows him to explore the distinction between what is verifiable, and what is make believe. Of the estimated 67 million fake profiles on Facebook, he writes, “There are more social media ghosts, more people being second people, or living an invented life as doppelgangers, than there are citizens of the UK.”

Perhaps because of the underlying pathos of Pinn’s brief life, or because its message applies to us all, The Invention of Ronald Pinn hits home hardest. “Is there no copyright on one’s experience and only the ability of others to remember or forget?” No need to guess what Pinn’s still grieving mother would say to that. While O’Hagan might generally like to please others, clearly he is also prepared to take uncomfortable risks to find answers for our times.