Nikolaus Pevsner’s first radio broadcast was a straightforward elaboration of what Modern architecture meant, in a strand called ‘The Arts’, subtitled ‘A Fortnightly Miscellany of Talks’. ‘The Arts’ brought together pairs of speakers to give ten-minute presentations on related subjects. In this particular programme, broadcast two months before the end of the Second World War, the first speaker was Philip James. James was art director of the body that would become the Arts Council the following year but which had been set up by the government as CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) in 1940 to promote and defend British culture in the face of wartime demoralisation, weariness and scepticism.