Berlin: Imagine a City - Softcover

(a) wonderful book (THOMAS BRUSSIG FINANCIAL TIMES)

Berlin vies with London, currently, as the coolest city on the planet. MacLean's wonderfully knowledgable overview of the city's history helps explain the place's enduring fascination. (WILLIAM BOYD THE GUARDIAN)

"Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries" is an extraordinary work of history. To call it history is, in fact, reductive. There's some historical analysis, quite a lot of fiction, some philosophizing, lashings of wit and a fair dose of invective. It's a work of imagination, reflection, reverence, perplexity and criticism that reveals as much about the author's precocious mind as it does about the city he adores. The book's most profound feature, however, is its beautiful writing - phrases of transcendent rhythm force the reader to reverse and read again. Never mind that the logic is occasionally shaky and the facts sometimes slip, the prose is perfect. MacLean calls Berlin "the capital of reinvention." This explains why his biography of the city is not about the place per se, but about those who shaped it or were shaped by it: Berlin as a canvas on which people paint their dreams. (Gerard De Groot THE WASHINGTON POST, Book of the Year)

This grandly ambitious work has a noble intention: to re-create through art and imagination the whole historic presence of a great capital, from its beginnings to its present day...Maclean's book is a wonderful achievement, not justly to be summarised in the few hundred words of a review. but hauntingly representing, as in a tangled dream, 600 years of history. (Jan Morris THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

A brilliant new history of Berlin...What makes MacLean's history of Berlin stand out is that this is an intensely human document, a rich tapestry spanning five centuries and woven together through intimate portraits of 21 if its former inhabitants which collectively reveal the narrative of the city....This is how I love history to be told, through the people who live it...a fascinating book. (THE OBSERVER)

The best history is biography: the story of the people who shaped and destroyed, entertained, beautified and murdered. Rory MacLean imagines Berlin through its inhabitants. (THE TIMES)

Rory MacLean offers an entirely beguiling and original portrait of Berlin. His is a highly unusual history told in a variety of forms by 'vital anonymous players in history's grand drama' alongside some of the major thinkers, dreamers, artists, warmongers and idealists who have shaped this eternally enthralling metropolis....a perfect companion for those about to discover, or attempting to make sense of, their own Berlin. (THE INDEPENDENT)

Rory MacLean's Berlin: Imagine a History is intelligent, entertaining and ambitious...MacLean has written a great book about Berliners. (NEW STATESMAN)

MacLean's original and well-researched vignettes makes up a mosaic and kaleidoscope. MacLean is a highly visual writer, and his dialogue is crisp and believable. Rory MacLean deserves to win all the prizes going. (Robert Carver THE TABLET)

[MacLean] writes with the lyricism of Bruce Chatwin and the traveller's eye of Marco Polo. He engages with his readers as if he is talking to an intelligent friend. Read this book if you already know Berlin, or will do one day. (THE OLDIE)

Rory MacLean is one of Britain's most expressive and adventurous travel writers. His ten books, including UK best-sellers 'Stalin's Nose' and 'Under the Dragon', have challenged and invigorated creative non-fiction writing, and - according to the late John Fowles - are among works that 'marvellously explain why literature still lives'. He has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. He has written and presented over 50 BBC radio programmes and worked on movies with Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Rory divides his time between Berlin, London and Dorset.