Genja Jonas (+ 1938) · Public domain

Pevsner all but invented the serious study of British architecture as an outsider to it: a German-Jewish art historian who fled the Nazis in 1933, he spent decades touring England county by county to write The Buildings of England, a 46-volume guide completed in 1974 that remains a standard reference. He also founded the Pelican History of Art series and helped establish the Victorian Society in 1957, arguing for the value of buildings most of Britain dismissed as merely functional — "a bicycle shed is a building," he wrote, "Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture." His mother, unable to escape Germany, took her own life in 1942 rather than be deported.