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Sir Nikolaus Pevsner
British art historian
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Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (born Jan. 30, 1902, Leipzig, Ger.—died Aug. 18, 1983, London, Eng.) German-born British art historian. He studied at various German universities and taught at Göttingen University (1929–33) before moving to England to escape Nazism. There he taught at the Universities of London, Oxford, and Cambridge. He is best known for his writings on architecture, especially his 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951–74), one of the great achievements of 20th-century art scholarship. He conceived and edited the Pelican History of Art series (1953– ); many of these individual volumes have become classics.