'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, ... a timely and brilliant book.' CLAIRE TOMALIN, EVENING STANDARD 'A vivid celebration of the city, but also an elegy for its decline, bubbling with statistics and anecdote, from Boadicea to...

Discusses about millennia of human ingenuity in the quest to cheat death. This book features various chapters that sum up one of these battlefields such as surgery, doctors, disease, hospitals, laboratories and the human body. It is suitable for those who are keenly aware of their own mortality and wants to do something about it.