Susie Harries

Pevsner kept diaries – little blue volumes that he called his Heftchen, or exercise books – for more than sixty years. He would ultimately destroy dozens of the Heftchen as part of a promise he had made to his wife.

 

But, as one can see even in the shortest excerpts, those that remain – all handwritten, most in German, some in a shorthand of his own devising – are an extraordinary record of a personality, astonishingly detailed and yet incomplete, authoritative and inconsistent, pedantic and passionate, analytical and unreasonable.