‘My parents didn’t give me anything to rebel against,’ says Jonathan Meades in An Encyclopaedia of Myself. ‘I was denied pretty much all the normal adolescent rites. They didn’t worry about how I dressed. They liked a lot of my friends.’ According to Stephen Fry: ‘No one understands England better than Meades’, and he doesn’t just mean Jonathan’s forensic knowledge of our landscape and architecture, which is showcased in Museum without Walls, but his understanding of the English condition of ‘mustn’t grumble’. ‘Meades is fast, splenetic and brilliant,’ says Andrew Billen of The Times, who will be conducting this rare interview.
