Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden & Gottingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job & looked for employment in Engl&. Here, over a long & amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration & enjoyment of English art & architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England is usually referred to simply as ' Pevsner'. As a critic, academic & champion of Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing range, from Gothic cathedrals & Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain & Brutalist tower blocks. Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien & his assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen
- secret diaries he kept from the age of fourteen for another sixty years
- reveal hidden aspirations & anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart). Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers &, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind. Her definitive biography is not only rich in context & far-ranging, but is also brought to life by"ations from Pevsner himself. His life
- as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history
- illuminates both the predicament & the prowess of the continental emigres who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.