Jonathan Meades and photographer Alex Boyd present a unique exploration of 'The Isle of Rust', better known as Lewis and Harris. A decade on from Meades' landmark series 'Off Kilter', described by The Telegraph as 'a masterpiece', Boyd returns to the island, spending two years living and working, documenting the stunning landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, a strange, sometimes rusty paradise. Alongside Meades' insightful observations and explorations of the island, Boyds photography captures the rugged and austere beauty of the place, from the bays and mountains of Harris, to the unique moorland shacks of Lewis. With 150 new images, the book is complemented by an essay by Professor Dan Hicks of Oxford University which explores the legacy of man on the land, and what we can learn from how islanders have lived alongside what has been left behind.
Authors
Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is a writer, food journalist, essayist and film-maker. Meades has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects. His books include three works of fiction and several anthologies. Meades is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of the British Humanist Association. Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at King's College, Taunton, which he described as "a dim, muscular Christian boot camp". He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1968. Meades wrote reviews and articles for The Times for many years, and was specifically its restaurant critic from 1986 to 2001. He was voted Best Food Journalist in the 1999 Glenfiddich Awards. Having given up writing about English cuisine in 2001 after being The Times' restaurant critic for fifteen years, Meades estimated, in an interview with Restaurant magazine, that he had put on 5 lb a year during his reviewing period, which works out around an ounce per restaurant. By his own statement in the series Meades Eats, after being pronounced 'morbidly obese' he subsequently managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of a year. His first collection of stories Filthy English was followed by Pompey (1993), which was widely praised and compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Dickens and Joyce amongst other great stylists. Meades' An Encyclopaedia of Myself was published in May 2014 by Fourth Estate. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece." Meades' book Museum Without Walls was published on the Unbound crowd-funding site, in both print and e-book editions.
