Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Thursday 17 March 2016

Meeting the Editor of Pevsner


As I walked past Blackwell's Art bookshop on Broad St in Oxford this afternoon I was approached by a gentleman who asked if I would take his photograph next to one of the shop windows as one of the books was by him, and his publishers would like to see it. The book in questuion was a guide to English Church architecture designed to accompany the Buildings of England series founded by, and still thought of as being by, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner.

I was happy to oblige, and found that my interlocutor was Dr Simon Bradley the current editor-in-chief of Pevsner. I expressed my almost life-long appreciation for the series, and said how I had once kept a little list of emendations for the West Riding volume when I still lived in Yorkshire. He suggested I send him that, which I will do, when I have reconstructed it from memory.

A very pleasant encounter, and illustrative of the peopel one meets on the streets of Oxford.

No comments: