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 Meadess 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.