An Encyclopaedia of Myself

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 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.