Nikolaus Pevsner

“Pevsner was very much the German bourgeois Jew - a certain amount of austerity and not a lot of giggles.”

“Pevsner's career is a prism through which to view the world of art history as it developed in England in the middle of the twentieth century.”

“It was perhaps a bad moment to undertake an architectural guide to the City of London. There are, at the time of writing, still whole areas lying waste after bombing in the Second World War. A number of the City churches, also, are not yet repaired or restored. Yet the publication of this volume was much asked for; so I decided to undertake it in spite of these disadvantages.”

“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”