Pedro and Ricky Come Again
Selected Writing 1988–2020
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- £13.99
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
This landmark publication collects three decades of writing from one of the most original, provocative and consistently entertaining voices of our time. Anyone who cares about language and culture should have this book in their life.
Thirty years ago, Jonathan Meades published a volume of reportorial journalism, essays, criticism, squibs and fictions called Peter Knows What Dick Likes. The critic James Wood was moved to write: ‘When journalism is like this, journalism and literature become one.’
Pedro and Ricky Come Again is every bit as rich and catholic as its predecessor. It is bigger, darker, funnier, and just as impervious to taste and manners. It bristles with wit and pin-sharp eloquence, whether Meades is contemplating northernness in a German forest or hymning the virtues of slang.
From the indefensibility of nationalism and the ubiquitous abuse of the word ‘iconic’, to John Lennon’s shopping lists and the wine they call Black Tower, the work assembled here demonstrates Meades's unparalleled range and erudition, with pieces on cities, artists, sex, England, concrete, politics and much, much more.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic and filmmaker Meades (Peter Knows What Dick Likes) collects reviews, essays, reported pieces, and speeches over 30 years in this gargantuan and whip-smart outing. The entries are organized into thematic chapters that run alphabetically from "Art and Artists" to "Writers." In "Concrete," Meades sings the praises of oft-maligned brutalist architecture: "It is all exhilaratingly impure. It's an oxymoron, a mongrel, centrifugal, simultaneously pulling in several directions." He expresses a similar appreciation for the "monument to our unflagging creativity" found in slang, which he describes in "Language" as a style of communication that reveals the "raw creature" within. And in "Regeneration," he extols Bristol as "the most visually exciting, gloriously impure and thrillingly incoherent of English cities because there are no consensuses—of style, building material, height or size." Never afraid to go guns blazing ("Urbanism shares the properties of a cult," and The Endless City, he writes, should be titled "The Endless Cliche"), Meades emerges as a fiercely independent thinker and a formidable intellect. His acerbic style carries the day, and readers bored of dry criticism will relish these piquant ripostes.
