Overview

"This is the first biography of Nikolaus Pevsner, the best known and most important architectural historian of the twentieth-century. Nikolaus Pevsner was the best known and most important architectural historian of the twentieth century, admired for dedicating his career to areas of English architecture that had never been considered before. But this English specialist and honorary Englishman, knighted in 1969, only came to England at the age of 31. He had been born and brought up in Germany, didn't imagine that English architecture would become his life's focus, and had no wish to move to England even when forced from teaching by the Nazis. Amplified by analyses of Pevsner's writings and a wealth of personal memories, ""Pevsner"" is the first book to explain one of England's first celebrity scholars - a man who, against the backdrop of Hitler and the troubled politics of the 1930s, had to rethink his entire career when England offered him his only refuge."

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9781441143860

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Now, finally, we have the first part of the full biography that Games has been working on for most of his adult life... there is much good primary source -material. Pevsner's story, in the end, is the personification, in one brilliant individual, of fractured Europe in the 20th century. (Sunday Times) An intelligent account of Pevsner's early development... This is a gripping and important story. (The Tablet) Games's biography is based on energetic research - almost Pevsnerian in its industry - in innumerable archives. In a lively, informal style he presents an account of Pevsner's German background such as not hitherto been available. (Times Literary Supplement)

Games has spent years on getting straight the story of Pevsner's early life and telling it fully and fairly ... The triumph of the book is his picture of German cultural and academic life during Pevsner's youth. Games illuminates this potentially stodgy subject with verve, passion and detail.--Architecture Today, June 1, 2010

Author Information

Stephen Games is an author and editor. His books include John Betjeman's Trains and Buttered Toast, Tennis Whites and Teacakes, Sweet Songs of Zion and most recently Betjeman's England. He is the author of Behind the Facade and editor of Pevsner on Art and Architecture, the collection of Pevsner's radio talks in which he first revealed some of the paradoxes of Pevsner's German past. He was educated at the Central School of Art and Magdalene College, Cambridge, made documentaries for BBC Radio and was the first arts correspondent of The Independent. His architectural reviews for The Guardian earned him a British Press Award. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and been deputy editor of the RIBA Journal.

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