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1 month ago | 
vittlesmagazine.com | Jonathan Meades |Rosa Lyster |Ruby Tandoh
This essay is part of our supplement Too Many Cookbooks. To read the rest of the series, please click below:Reinventing the Hexagon, by Jonathan MeadesMachiavelli in the Kitchen, by Rosa Lyster15 Cookbooks That Changed Everything, by Ruby TandohCookbooks in Translation, by Guan Chua, Christie Dietz, Anissa Helou, Ibrahim Hirsi, Saba Imtiaz, TW Lim, Lutivini Majanja, Meher Mirza, Marie Mitchell & Rachel Roddy. I have always been a terrible recipe writer.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Jonathan Meades
A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard Viking, pp.310, 26.99 Simon Jenkins has, over the years, assembled a winsome array of higher coffee-table books about the kind of building which welcomes National Trust mobility scooters and the beige brethren aboard them. This is a man who knows the cardigan market. And he knows his stuff, mostly.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Jonathan Meades
Simon Jenkins has, over the years, assembled a winsome array of higher coffee-table books about the kind of building which welcomes National Trust mobility scooters and the beige brethren aboard them. This is a man who knows the cardigan market. And he knows his stuff, mostly. He subscribes to a version of the Great Man school of history, which casts the great man as an exigent client who believes himself the maker or author.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Jonathan Meades
Rory Stewart: The Long History of IgnoranceBBC Radio 4 In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know: ‘where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise’ (Thomas Gray, OE).
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Jonathan Meades
Text size Line Spacing Comments Share Share Jonathan Meades A familiar OE-led balls-up: Rory Stewart’s The Long History of Ignorance reviewed Linkedin Messenger Email Rory Stewart: The Long History of Ignorance BBC Radio 4 In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know: ‘where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise’ (Thomas Gray, OE). Such ignorance is a state which, happily enough, Rory Stewart, OE and a fully tooled-up Mob from...
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May 19, 2024 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Jonathan Meades
Yesterday's tomorrows: Future Systems' Grand hotel Credit: Phaidon Every year, with a maximum of clamorous self-congratulation, the reprehensible construction industry doles out prizes to the most groundbreakingly sustainable work by a young architect, the most iconically sustainable thatched monastery, the most ethically sustainable solar-powered bike shed and so on. The risible ceremonies attached to the celebrations are enhanced by borrowing the names of grander bashes: thus, the...
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Sep 30, 2023 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Jonathan Meades
Near the end of this hectoring exercise in partiality, Nabila Ramdani announces that “the Algerian war is over”. Given that many of her preceding 300 pages have been devoted to arguing the opposite, this is odd.
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Sep 15, 2023 | 
terryfreedman.substack.com | Crispin Sartwell |Robert MacFarlane |Robert Macfarlane |Jonathan Meades |Terry Freedman
Greetings!The first part of this newsletter comprises a rather long article about good beginnings to articles. Then there are a couple of articles about tools I use. In one case it was to extract the text from a fifty year-old stencilled magazine. In the other it’s how I organise the resources for this newsletter and other blogs/newsletters I publish. As you know, I write and publish a lot; I need to be organised or it all fall apart. But enough of this persiflage! Let’s get to it.
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Sep 11, 2023 | 
yahoo.com | Jonathan Meades
Peace in our time: Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference, 1938 - Universal History ArchiveThe first major shock in Simon Heffer’s history of inter-war Britain – a vast album of unheeded alarms – can only be met with a double-take. After the Great War, Heffer writes, Chancellors of the Exchequer “had to master a practice largely unknown to their predecessors: economic management”.
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Jul 24, 2023 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Jonathan Meades
One of the many oddities of this altogether peculiar book is the intelligence that it is not sui generis. Indeed, astonishingly, it belongs to a fecund strain of transport fandom, whose exemplars are widely quoted and lavishly lauded. Given Andrew Martin’s dependence, in his “ode to the Paris Métro”, on those who have taken this track down the years, he would be graceless were he not to acknowledge his fellow anoraks.
