Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Jonathan Meades praises Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life

Yesterday I published a guest post about Nikolaus Pevsner and Leicestershire by Susie Harries. She is the author of the newly published Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life.

Her biography has been favourably reviewed by one of this blog's heroes, Jonathan Meades, in Country Life. He writes:
From this tangle of contradictions, Susie Harries has fashioned an outstandingly good biography. It is thorough, detached, humane and exceptionally skillful in its depiction (or creation) of a protagonist who is constantly mutating. The antipathetic Saxon prig of the early chapters gradually evolves into husband, father, expatriate, internee, rubble-shoveller, journalist, wit, editor, polemicist, historian, broadcaster and much else besides. By the end, he has turned into an often amused and often amusing titan of architectural taxonomy: success, as John Mortimer once pointed out, makes people nicer.
Another post of mine will guide you to a television film that Meades made about Pevsner, as well as to some more links.

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