by JonathanMeades (Author)
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 26 Feb 2015
ISBN 10: 1857029054
ISBN 13: 9781857029055
`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
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.
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