Museum Without Walls - Tapa dura

"I pick up Jonathan Meades's new collection of essays, Museum Without Walls and I read a paragraph or three. It's the writerly equivalent of standing on the top of Kinder Scout and breathing deeply. The scope of his ideas, the force of his arguments, the sheer vitality of his sentences: these things come at you like negative ions after a storm, with the result that you soon start to feel an awful lot better – envious but revitalised too." (Rachel Cooke New Statesman)

"One of the funniest and truest writers we have. No one understands England better than Meades." (Stephen Fry)

Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty sales & marketing years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'.

This book collects 54 pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers what he calls 'heavy entertainment' – strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics, or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible.