Bryan Appleyard

The Ruins of The Future

Cities

By

William Heinemann 320pp £20 order from our bookshop

‘THE WORLD’, RUNS John Reader’s first sentence, ‘is not short of books about cities.’ This is true but it’s a bad start. Most people scanning that line in a bookshop would pass on. It gets worse. At the foot of the first page he asks, ‘If so many books on cities already exist, why burden the shelves with another?’ Okay, okay, so why?

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