It took me four months to get from end of this book to the other and I feel I could quite easily reread it straight away and get even more out of it. It filled in some gaping holes in my knowledge. Taking a different approach to many histories it stays at the same point in time, on the eve of the First World War, and goes round the world looking at the situation in many different cities. It starts off in London, goes for a jaunt across the various old cities of Europe, on to the New World cities, out to the rest of the world, stops off to look at the “Twilight Powers” cities like Constantinople and Peking, and briefly pops back to London to consider what the next hundred years will bring for the British Empire. I feel a lot of the detail probably went over my head but I still got a lot out of the book.