` Roy Porter, a historian of formidable range, turns to urban history in this marvellously lucid, informative & passionate book... Porter`s facts are always at the service of the narrative, which has a finely maintained momentum, balancing statistics with the words of historians, diarists & novelists, poets & churchmen: Pepys, Boswell, Fielding, Walpole, Blake, Mayhew, Wells, Woolf, Spark, .. .a timely & brilliant book.` CLAIRE TOMALIN, EVENING STANDARD `A vivid celebration of the city, but also an elegy for its decline, bubbling with statistics & anecdote, from Boadicea to Betjeman.` RICHARD HOLMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR