Formerly the viceregal capital of Spain's vast South American empire, Lima is today a sprawling metropolis struggling to cope with a population of eight million. Located on the coast between the Andean foothills and the Pacific Ocean, it is many cities in one, with an indigenous past, an old colonial heart, and turn-of-the-century quarters modeled on Paris. Leafy suburbs like San Isidro and tranquil seaside communities such as Barranco contrast with ever-expanding shantytowns. Lima has always dominated national life, as the center of political and economic power. Long a stronghold of the...

Foreword by Penelope Lively Cairo is a city of extremes. On its chaotic streets BMWs driven by sharp-suited businessmen compete for space with donkey carts laden with farm produce. In its mosques the wealthy and the destitute pray side by side. The largest metropolis in Africa since the Middle Ages, it was in Ibn Battutah's words "the mother of cities." With a present-day population of around eighteen million, this sprawling metropolis is home to one thousand new migrants every day, drawn to the seething intensity of a modern, cosmopolitan capital that blends together the...

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 produced sweeping changes, including massive new building projects, and the surprising revelation that Dublin has become fashionable. Siobhan Kilfeather finds the legacy of the past undergoing a...

Founded in 1718 by two French-Canadian brothers for French King Louis XIV, New Orleans grew from its roots as a Euro-Caribbean port city at the nexus of North, Central and South America. Situated at the bottom of the Mississippi River Delta, the city became "Paris on the Mississippi," the fashionable cultural capital of the American South, home to America's first opera house and birthplace of jazz.
Many think of New Orleans, with its antebellum mansions, above-ground cemeteries and ghostly moss-bearded oaks as a haunted place. It is certainly the most un-American of American cities,...

Kyoto, the ancient former capital of Japan, breathes history and mystery. Its temples, gardens and palaces are testimony to many centuries of aristocratic and religious grandeur. Under the veneer of modernity, the city remains filled with countless reminders of a proud past. John Dougill explores this most venerable of Japanese cities, revealing the spirit of place and the individuals that have shaped its often dramatic history. Courtiers and courtesans, poets and priests, samurai and geisha people the pages of his account. Covering twelve centuries in all, the book not only provides a...

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.

Richard Tames describes how London has been chronicled, described, celebrated, named, and mapped over the twenty centuries of its existence to become a city treasured even by those who have never set foot in it as a byword for innovation and diversity. This book has been written for those who, knowing London, know that it is too vast, too complex, too elusive ever to be fully known but yet would like to know it better still.

Hong Kong has always been something of an anomaly, and an outpost of empire, whether British or Chinese. Once described as a barren island, the former fishing community has been transformed by its own economic miracle into one of Asia's World Cities, taking in its stride the territory's 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty. Beneath the surface of Hong Kong's cliched self-image as Pearl of the Orient and Shopping Paradise, Michael Ingham reveals a city rich in history, myth, and cultural diversity.