We have all come here this morning, to this fine church of 1853 which he described as built ‘on a Cathedral scale and in a Cathedral style’, to honour the memory of a great man, a good man, and a wonderful — and indeed in one respect an incomparable — friend and lover of England.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s paternal grandparents were Russian — Russian Jews. Towards the end of the last century they moved west, first to Poland and then to Germany.

His father, Hugo Pevsner, built up a very successful business in furs at Leipzig, where Nika, the younger of the two sons, was born in 1902. His mother was an intellectual, the friend of writers, painters and musicians — Paderewski, for example — who gave her son, after 1918 her only surviving son, every encouragement to become an art historian. Not very long after her husband’s death in 1940, she took her own life, to escape the concentration camp.