Hinterland

Jonathan Meades had a beef with wokery and cancel culture before those terms even existed

Jonathan Meades is the most significant cultural critic writing in English today. His range is so broad: the wider public know him for his BBC series on architecture and his columns about food, but he can be just as insightful and provocative on music, politics, topography, literature, pop culture and painting; and seems to have an all-embracing knowledge of those things in relation to most western and northern European countries, notably France, where he has lived for the past 15 years.

Now the full bouquet of Meades is available in a vast and handsome book Pedro and Ricky Come Again: Selected Writing 1988-2020 (Unbound, £30). Meades is a master of observation, the arresting phrase and the illuminating metaphor. He also has an irresistible urge to show the cloven hoof; even, and especially it seems, when having given his readers the notion that he is writing about someone or something he admires. For example, after praising Richard Rogers for having “designed a number of sheerly thrilling and stylistically various buildings”, he regrets that Rogers has “developed a peculiar late-life fondness for auto-destruction” and suggests that a second edition of his memoirs should be entitled Prosecco Socialism: A User’s Manual. But he praises Bob Monkhouse, mentioning in passing that Diana Dors’s then husband had an underworld contract put out on him: for Meades, the low life is inevitably more fascinating than the high (a penchant he shared with the late, and apparently deeply unpleasant, Elizabeth David, who nearly went up close and personal with the late, and far less unpleasant,

Jeffrey Bernard).

A review of a Leni Riefenstahl biography allows Meades to expatiate on “the troubled sexuality and protracted infantilism from which so many Nazis suffered”. Elsewhere, he describes his “five nervous minutes” at a party with Alain Robbe-Grillet, which he spent “drooling to him as many had drooled before me”. The instinctive response of the “supreme selfparodist of les trente moins glorieuses” to Meades – this was in 1970 – was to ask how short skirts were in London that year. In his introduction (in which he professes “my opinions contradict their precursors and belong to a different writer”) Meades says this is “evidently a book which is to be dipped into”. That is easier said than done; once one gets on the rollercoaster of the world according to Meades, it is only with difficulty that one gets off until 960 pages later.

Also in that introduction, in a tone of cynicism one hopes is deployed partly for effect, Meades concludes that “conviction is a euphemism for bigotry, intolerance, monodirectional certainty”. Yet, whether he can help it or not, Meades’s convictions shine throughout this collection, such as in his defence of Brutalist architecture. He feels it upsets the British because of their sense that such buildings have a brutal effect on the ruling aesthetic, a trope they cling to while not realising that the term comes from the building material, raw concrete or,

in the French of Le Corbusier, béton brut. However, as Meades then remarks, that doesn’t stop the French loathing Brutalist buildings too, and they know perfectly well what the phrase means.

Meades waged a one-man war against political correctness, wokery and cancel culture long before any of the terms were invented; this, too, is one of his convictions – and an entirely admirable one. Writing in 2005 about religion (of which he is no admirer) he said that “there is a new intolerance abroad. A willingness to challenge the right to free speech.” He exercises his commitment to it with wit and perceptiveness. Noting that the author of a book he regarded as badly written had a degree from Oxford in modern languages, he muses that “one must assume that English was not among them”.

Reviewing a self-regarding book by an architect, he says that “the only original component is the autobiographical one” and that “the single occasion on which he prompts sympathy is when he admits that he was taught in Welsh”. Remarking on a guide to parish churches, he consoles “those who rue the absence… of allusions to the Church’s strong suit, paedophilia” that a fresco at Purewell in Dorset was painted by a man who used “unclothed local boys” as his models. We are also reminded that the actor who used to advertise Special K on television died of bowel cancer, and that, had Stephen Tennant been born a girl, he might “have ended up a duchess; as it was he was fated to remain forever a queen”. There are more gems in this wonderful book than I could cram into a dozen of these columns.

Meades is inevitably more interested in the low life than the high

‘Conviction is a euphemism for bigotry’: Meades refuses to be cowed