The allure of California – its climate, its mineral wealth – has always been offset by its precarious position on the geological map. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 saw a city that had gotten rich quick thanks to the gold rush find its fertile ground being torn from under it; but, as Simon Winchester’s thorough account of the disaster makes clear, it was geological innocence rather than any innate Californian hubris – or general ineptitude – that allowed the earthquake to have such an effect.

San Francisco’s population saw its most rapid growth in the mid nineteenth century, after James Marshall had found those first gold flakes near Sacramento. It was a hastily constructed city, which had learned to cater for single men in search of a quick fortune: a place of assembly-line brothels and