An Encyclopaedia of Myself
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About this ebook
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
Johnathan Meades is a British novellist and writer on food, architecture, and culture, as well as an innovative broadcaster. Perhaps best known for his television appearences on ‘Abroad with Jonathan Meades’ and its sequel series, Meades is also a succesful novellist. His previous books include The Illustrated Atlas of the World's Great Buildings (1980), Filthy English (1984), Architectural Expressions (2001), Incest and Morris Dancing (2002) and The Fowler Family Business (2002).
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Reviews for An Encyclopaedia of Myself
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm a big Jonathan Meades fan so I'm biased. He's not yet a national treasure, like Alan Bennet, but he should be. The problem is that he's not easily classifiable - other than being an iconoclast. He's best known for his writing and TV programmes on architecture. But, a few years ago, he made a documentary on his 1950's childhood in Salisbury and about his father, a sales rep for a biscuit company. It was great. And now, here is his childhood autobiography.
Any book that starts with a section called 'Abusers, Sexual' and apologises for the fact that he was never sexually abused as a child and then goes through, in great detail, all the cliched sexual abusers (most notably the euphemistic 'friend of the family') has to capture your interest.
Even so, I must issue a warning. Meades is overly in love with language and will use the most obscure vocabulary whenever he can. Sometimes, reading him is like eating a whole pile of cream cakes. I especially found his childhood experiences fascinating as I was also a child of the 5os and 60s and so could wallow in his memories of sweets, toys, pop music and films. His cast of characters is unbelievably huge and yet each one of them is described in exhaustive Dickensian detail. As a writer, he uses a range of original metaphors which I'd love to steal. I particularly liked his search for a suitable term to describe himself in his late sixties. He finally settles on calling himself a 'pre-dotard'.