This is the first biography of Nikolaus Pevsner, the best known and most important architectural historian of the twentieth-century. Nikolaus Pevsner was the best known and most important architectural historian of the twentieth century, admired for dedicating his career to areas of English architecture that had never been considered before. But this English specialist and honorary Englishman, knighted in 1969, only came to England at the age of 31. He had been born and brought up in Germany, didn't imagine that English architecture would become his life's focus, and had no wish to move to England even when forced from teaching by the Nazis. Amplified by analyses of Pevsner's writings and a wealth of personal memories, Pevsner is the first book to explain one of England's first celebrity scholars - a man who, against the backdrop of Hitler and the troubled politics of the 1930s, had to rethink his entire career when England offered him his only refuge.