London

''Roy Porter, a historian of formidable range, turns to urban history in this marvellously lucid, informative and 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 and novelists, poets and churchmen: Pepys, Boswell, Fielding, Walpole, Blake, Mayhew, Wells, Woolf, Spark, ...