The Inscriptions of Ralph Beyer
JOHN NEILSON
(LUND HUMPHRIES, 176 PP, £19.95)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

During the night of 14 November 1940, a German air raid on Coventry destroyed its medieval cathedral and city centre, killing 600 people. Twenty-two years later, a completely new structure was consecrated as Coventry’s seat of worship. Among the glories of twentieth-century art commissioned for it were eight monumental inscriptions entitled “The Tablets of the Word”. Fittingly, they were the work of a refugee from the Nazi regime, Ralph Beyer, whose Jewish mother had perished in Auschwitz. This, the first monograph devoted to him, coincides with the centenary of his birth.