Oh Brother, where art thou?

Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’.

Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’. That is roughly what has happened with The Buildings of England guide to Hampshire. The guides used to fit into an overcoat pocket; now you’d need the glove compartment of a car. High praise is due to the authors of this volume for careful scholarship, an outstanding array of colour illustrations, and a literary style which is not drily academic, but relaxed and colloquial.

The Buildings of England series was inaugurated by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in 1951. The feud between Pevsner and John Betjeman has been raked over. To the poet, Pevsner was a ‘Herr Professor Doktor’, a baldly categorising academic of Teutonic thoroughness.