The first biography of Nikolaus Pevsner, the best known and most important architectural historian of the 20th-century.

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 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. Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of 14 for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and 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 and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind.Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself. He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the rigour of German scholarship, he became an Everyman in his copious commissions, publications, broadcasts and lectures on art, architecture, design, education, town planning, social housing, conservation, Mannerism, the Bauhaus, the Victorians, Zeitgeist, Englishness and how a nation's character may, or must, be reflected in its art. His life - as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history - illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.

A previously unpublished work by Nikolaus Pevsner, much of which was published as journal articles in the Architectural Review in the 1940s and 1950s during Pevsner's term as editor.

This volume on London architecture covers the boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey and Islington. It gives a view of London's expansion northward from formal Georgian squares, to the hill towns of Hampstead and Highgate.

The premier monument is Durham Cathedral, greatest of English Norman churches. Lovers of the Middle Ages will also seek out the county's exceptional Anglo-Saxon churches, while many of its great castles - Brancepeth, Raby, Auckland, Lambton - conceal palatial Georgian and Victorian interiors. The landscape varies dramatically, from the wilds of Teesdale and Weardale, in the west, to the pioneering industrial ports of Sunderland and Hartlepool on the coast, including fine gentry houses and stone-built market towns. South Tyneside and northern Cleveland, historically part of County Durham, are also covered.

Nikolaus Pevsner was one of the most important and influential art historians of the twentieth century. He opened up new areas of enquiry in the history of art, revolutionising architectural studies in England and playing a key role in establishing the discipline of design history. Through his lectures and broadcasts, as well as the remarkable volumes in The Buildings of England series which made him a household name, he did much to encourage greater interest in, and understanding of, art and architecture among a wide public. This wide-ranging collection of essays, based on papers delivered at the conference held at Birkbeck in celebration of the centenary of Pevsner's birth, offers the first sustained critical assessment of Pevsner's achievements. With contributions by leading international scholars, the volume brings together a wealth of new material on Pevsner and his intellectual background, both in Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s and in England, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s.