An Encyclopaedia of Myself

Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014 `A symphonic poem about postwar England and Englishness ... A masterpiece' Financial Times The 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades's detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, drunks, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury had two industries: God and the Cold War. For the child, delight is to be found everywhere - in the intense observation of adult frailties, in landscapes and prepubescent sex, in calligraphy and in rivers. This memoir is an engrossing portrait of a disappeared provincial England, a time and place unpeeled with gruesome relish.

Jonathan Meades's most recent book `Museum Without Walls' was selected as a book of the year by seven critics. He has since published a box of photos in postcard form, `Pidgin Snaps'. His new films `Concrete Poetry' are in praise of brutalist architecture and will be transmitted on BBC4 in March 2014.

`By far the best picture of the 1950s I have read' George Walden, The Times `A sulphurously brilliant alphabetical stroll through the seamier byways of the author's youth in post-war Salisbury' Jane Shilling, Evening Standard, Books of the Year `A radiant account of Britain getting itself together' Kathryn Hughes, BBC Radio 4, Books of the Year `An Encyclopaedia of Myself is a corrective - an anti-misery memoir' Stuart Jeffries. Guardian `Meades vividly conjures a vanished world of Cracker Barrel cheese adverts, Aertex shirts and `Johnny Remember Me' on the airwaves ... He is a very great prose stylist, with a dandy's delight in the sound and feel of words, and we are lucky to have him.' Ian Thomson, Spectator