Nikolaus Pevsner: The LifeBorn 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 and Göttingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and 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 and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. |
Contents
1 | |
3 | |
20 | |
Castles in the air | 34 |
Entwicklungsroman | 42 |
Academic on the rise 19211933 | 49 |
It takes diligence to make a genius | 51 |
Coupled to a tender heart | 62 |
Birkbeck and the excursions | 417 |
a milder modernism | 435 |
Cambridge 19491954 | 448 |
The grim mopping up of work | 462 |
The Englishness of English Art | 484 |
No time to laugh | 501 |
Pevsner and Betjeman | 527 |
Always doing | 550 |
Germanys present ruin | 68 |
Now the climb can begin | 79 |
The satisfaction of getting there | 90 |
England 1930 | 97 |
Culturepolitics | 107 |
Antechambering | 120 |
Changing tracks England 19331939 | 131 |
If a German why this one? | 133 |
More than just an episode | 152 |
Amor fati | 174 |
Little man what now? | 188 |
Pioneers of the Modern Movement | 201 |
95 British is as far as we can go | 226 |
Pevsners war 19391946 | 245 |
Phoney War | 247 |
Internee 54829 | 258 |
1941 | 283 |
Now we are scattered | 312 |
Contrast surprise and irregularity | 335 |
Pevsner in an English uniform | 359 |
Digging in 19461959 | 379 |
the beginnings of the Buildings of England | 381 |
Theyve come to read the meter Ma | 399 |
uncovering the Victorians | 567 |
Establishment figure 1960s | 581 |
On Finding Oneself Out of Date | 583 |
NonStopography | 594 |
Was it before or after 1963? | 610 |
life without Lola | 633 |
Looking at old buildings with an old man | 655 |
More than is good for a mans work | 670 |
This intercalation of labours | 679 |
The only one is duty | 697 |
Endings 1970s | 711 |
Quite enough of that now | 713 |
Give me time eternal gods | 729 |
Is it in Pevsner? | 742 |
Right good is rest | 757 |
Morality and architecture | 764 |
Conclusion | 765 |
Not quite in the English way | 795 |
Note on Sources and Abbreviations | 803 |
Notes | 805 |
Copyright Acknowledgements | 831 |
835 | |