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 over a 37-year period between 1945-1977.
'Stephen Games's new compendium of broadcast lecture texts represents an invaluable enrichment of the increasingly diverse literature on the life, career and ideas of Nikolaus Pevsner - one of the focal figures of mid-20th-century visual culture in England. Not just that - but, in conjunction with the forthcoming companion volume, Pevsner at the BBC, it will do much to illuminate the wider interconnections between cultural commentators and the mass media in the era of humanist social democracy that Noel Annan fondly dubbed Our Age. Those, after all, were years when public discourse on the built environment was still pervaded by high ideals and grand narratives of Progress and social salvation - in stark contrast with the empty posturing that passes for architectural theory in today's time of image-led, iconic nihilism!' Miles Glendinning, University of Edinburgh, UK 'Conversational, spontaneous, wide-ranging, and often responding to recent travels and encounters, Pevsner's broadcasts reveal a side that does not appear in his more scholarly writings. Reading the transcripts today, they show him reaching beyond the circle of professionals and academics, as part of his mission to bring informed discussion of architecture into the orbit of everyday life.' Adrian Forty, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK 'This volume will appeal to those with an above average interest in art and architecture ... Recommended.' Choice 'Games provides extensive introductory material for each script as well as to the whole collection, which addresses the controversial aspects of Pevsner's career in great detail'. Cassone 'Here for the first time between covers are the surviving texts of 113 talks on art and architecture given by the greatest of all British architectural historians, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner.' Newsletter of the Ancient Monuments Society 'So what is the value of this collection? Firstly it is a reminder of Pevs
