An Encyclopaedia of Myself

The 1950s are not grey, not in Jonathan Meades's detailed, petit-point memoir, where they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, reckless bohos, pompous boors, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury, where he was brought up, had two industries: God and the Cold War, both of which provided a cast of adults for the child to scrutinise with wonder and fear.