The idea of this book sounded good, if a little ambitious - a collection of short essays by distinguished experts presenting a global overview of the role of particular cities in history from ancient times until 2009. But in practice, it turns out that the essays are simply too short (1000-1500 words) for most of the experts to get around to saying anything really interesting about their cities before the editor's red light comes on. And there's no real attempt to draw any general conclusions from what they say - Norwich's introductions to each of the five broad time periods are brief and do little more than touch on some of the big historical themes that are important for the period. After reading it, I discovered that the book was originally issued by Thames & Hudson in a big, glossy coffee-table format with lots of pictures, which would make a lot more sense for such a book than the later "compact edition" in which I read it, with illustrations at the rate of only about one to every four essays, gathered into blocks of colour plates.

That's not to say that it's a complete waste of time - whilst many of the contributors waste precious space telling you what you almost certainly already know (Rory Maclean reduces Berlin to little more than a truncated Wikipedia entry), others, like A. N. Wilson on London or James Cuno on Chicago, have more instinct for the form and manage to home in on non-obvious details that tell you something relevant about their cities. Norwich - as you would expect - has claimed Constantinople, Palermo and Venice for himself, and of course does a very nice job of condensing the thousands of pages he has written about those cities to three or four each. ( )

I read this over a period of months, reading 5 of the essays on the chosen cities between each other book that i read. It proved a total mixed bag without little consistency of approach; some were interesting, some boring. I think my approach made the best of it. ( )

A great big coffee table of a book, with a great mixture of photos, art and vignettes about each city in its particular place in world history. Nice. ( )