Roy Porter a historian of formidable range turns to urban history in this marvellously lucid informative & passionate book... Porters 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."