In 1940, Pevsner was taken to the internment camp at Huyton, Liverpool, as an enemy alien. Geoffrey Grigson later wrote in his "Recollections" (1984): "When at last two hard-faced Bow Street runners arrived in the early hours of the morning to take ... I managed, clutching my pyjama trousers, to catch them up with the best parting present I could quickly think of, which was an elegant little edition, a new edition, of Shakespeare's Sonnets." Pevsner was released after three months on the intervention of, among others, Frank Pick, then Director-General of the Ministry of Information. He spent some time in the months after the Blitz clearing bomb debris, and wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information's "Die Zeitung", an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England. He also completed for Penguin Books the Pelican paperback "An Outline of European Architecture", which he had begun to develop while in internment. "Outline" would eventually go into seven editions, be translated into 16 languages, and sell more than half a million copies.