AQUESTION FOR YOUR NEXTChristmas quiz: which knighted British architectural historian went to the same school as the composer Richard Wagner? Answer: Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83), the émigré German scholar who became one of the most influential public intellectuals in post-war Britain.
Pevsner went through a variety of self-reinventions along the way: from secular Jew to Christian convert; early enthusiast for Nazism to anti-Hitler polemicist in wartime Britain; 1920s champion of Modernism to 1960s ally of Betjeman in the campaign to save Victorian Gothic. Both he and Wagner attended the celebrated Thomasschule in Leipzig, albeit nine decades apart.
Schooling was not the only thing the two had in common. Both started projects in their mid-thirties so huge in scale and in timespan for their fulfilment that only those with a slightly deranged confidence in their own talent cycle, that would occupy him for much of the next three decades.
