Berlin is a party in a graveyard. It is Europe’s youth capital, and its guilty war conscience. It is a disputed construction site, built on the ruins of regimes. Today’s diversity - refugees, immigrants, arty expats, East and West - emerges from a history of violence. Berlin is as cutting-edge and contemporary as it is wary of its extreme past.

Berlin is a comprehensive short history and portrait of the German capital today. The story of Berlin’s vagaries over nine centuries - from a dry place in a bog to the control centre of modern Europe - is expertly portrayed by historian Joseph Pearson.

In this book, we find that elements of the city that for some can be unnerving - its emptiness, its provincialism, its ramshackle industrial eclecticism, its sexual freedoms, its confrontation with a murderous past - are precisely what give the city its charge.