Encyclopaedia of myself

Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Proze 2014. 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, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Ten years in the making, this memoir gives a certain slice of British life – post-war, rural life – its glorious due.