Pevsner: The BBC Years gives the first full account of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s engagement with the BBC at a time when both were the dominant institutions in their own fields -- Pevsner as the most persuasive figure in architecture and art history, the BBC as the country's sole broadcaster. A German emigré, Pevsner was not at first trusted to speak on the air, and was only invited to appear at the very end of the war, in spite of his growing eminence in academia and publishing. With the arrival of the Third Programme in 1946, however, he quickly became a broadcasting celebrity, and one whom senior BBC figures regarded as essential and novel listening. Pevsner: The BBC Years looks at the sudden rise in Pevsner’s standing at the BBC, at what he was admired for, and at the circumstances surrounding his being commissioned, in the mid-1950s, to give the first series of Reith Lectures on an arts subject -- the relationship between visual expression and national identity. The book explains the roles played by Geoffrey Grigson, Basil Taylor, Anna Kallin and Leonie Cohn in advancing Pevsner's BBC career, analyses the literary character of his broadcasting, and considers the function of his talks as an extension of European belletrism. It also demonstrates the significance of his concurrent editorship of the King Penguin series of books. In addition, Pevsner: The BBC Years documents the unravelling of Pevsner's reputation. It shows how he was caught between changing fashions in media culture and damaged by doubts about the safety of his ideas, both within the BBC and, externally, among British conservatives who found him too radical and American radicals who found him too conservative. In Pevsner: The BBC Years, correspondence from the BBC’s archives provides a case study of scholarly thought being exposed to independent scrutiny -- a process with lessons for today.

This book brings together the surviving texts of the 113 talks on art and architecture that we know of, given by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner on radio and television between 1945--1977. It includes the seven texts of the 1955 Reith Lectures in their original broadcast form, as well as lectures that Pevsner gave in German (for the BBC in London and RIAS in Berlin) and on the radio in New Zealand. These talks are important as an example of the attempt by the BBC in particular to provide intellectual programming for the mass population. The talks are important for what they reveal about changing tastes in the treatment of the arts as a broadcast topic, as well as offering a case study of the development of one particular historian's approach to a subject that was gaining ground in universities as a direct result of his popularisation of it. They show what topics were thought to be central to the artistic agenda in the mid-years of the last century, whether from an academic or journalistic perspective, and reveal the mode and manner of academic engagement with the public over the period. Forty-six of these talks were published in 2002, on the centenary of Pevsner's birth, in a trade edition. At the time, his reputation as an active force in architectural thinking had long been eclipsed and interest in him had waned. Since then, there has been a turn-around in tastes and Pevsner's role within his chosen field is now being actively studied and discussed by a new generation for whom he is central to an understanding of the 20th century. There is therefore a real need for this book. In addition to containing twice the number of talks as the previous volume, it is supplemented with explanatory introductions, footnotes and citations. It also reveals, as far as this is possible, alternative versions of Pevsner’s texts, as they appeared at different stages in the original production process. As such, this edition can be relied on by academics as scholarly and

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.

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.

Full of memorable and surprising buildings, Nottingham is a county that rewards close investigation. Great medieval churches are represented by Worksop, Newark and by Southwell, with its exquisite carved 'leaves'. Of its country houses, Wollaton Hall shows Elizabethan architecture at its most fantastic, Bunny Hall the English Baroque at its most bizarre, while Lord Byron's Newstead Abbey incorporates one of the strangest of all monastic ruins. The city of Nottingham, marvellously set between hills, is crowded with sturdy Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings, and enlivened by a strong local tradition of first-rate Modernist architecture.