Europe's most westerly capital city was established by invaders and was for most of its history the locus of colonial administration, the engine room of foreign power, and a major site of indigenous resistance. From The Act of Union through nineteenth-century decline and into the early years of Irish independence it was a city identified with poverty, dirt, and decaying splendor. The Celtic Tiger (as Ireland's recent economic boom been called) produced sweeping changes, including massive new building projects, and the surprising revelation that Dublin has become fashionable. Siobhan...

Caroline Brooke explores the way in which Moscow has reinvented itself over the years and the fascination it has exerted over the many writers, artists, and composers who made the city their home.

The views of Budapest by the River Danube are unparalleled in Europe. On one side the Buda Hills reach almost to the riverside, with Castle Hill and Gellert Hill offering outstanding panoramas. Pest, linked to Buda by a series of imposing bridges, with its mixture of late nineteenth-century Historicist and early twentieth-century Art Nouveau architecture, is still very much a "turn-of-the-century" city.

For more than fifty years prior to the Second World War, Budapest was one of the outstanding cultural capitals of Central Europe, on a par with, and in some ways ahead of, Vienna and...