A generation ago the typical "something in the City" was male, English and public school-educated. Brollies, bowlers, stripey trousers and boozey lunches were the order of the day.

Nowadays your typical City professional could be female and foreign, global in experience and outlook, getting up at 6.15 a.m. and finishing in the office about 12 hours later. It's not as much fun - less of the gentleman's club atmosphere - but you can earn far more money.

At the height of the "loadsamoney" rollercoaster in the 1980s an Oxbridge candidate admitted to his US investment banker interviewers that he could do with the money if they gave him the job. They laughed and replied: "There's only two groups in town that pay this kind of money. There's us and there's the Rolling Stones."

City yuppies were so hip they even had their own soap, Capital City, with a suitably cosmopolitan mix.

Hosting the world's most powerful international financial centre has had more than just economic consequences for Britain over the past 20 years. Money and markets have moved centre stage.

Tony Benn may rail against the "obscene worship" of money becoming "the most powerful fundamentalist religion in the world" but the Square Mile is more powerful than ever and is enjoying a second golden age.

How this came about is the business of City State. Roberts and Kynaston go back to the beginning, more than 300 years ago, and point out how the City was more or less ignored until very recently. Even eminent historians such as A.J.P. Taylor barely condescended to give it a mention.

City State is an economic history of London and Britain generally, and even manages to be funny in places.

If you get tired of wading through salary trends you can always look at the City's impact on rising property prices and see how they compare with property prices in Dublin.

Roberts and Kynaston discuss the advent of the euro in an even-handed way, emphasising the City's strength as a global financial centre, and they contend that joining the euro zone would not impact negatively.

In the aftermath of the John Rusnak trading scandal at AIB's US subsidiary Allfirst, they point out that the greatest threat to capitalism is internal market mechanisms rather than something external such as Arab terrorism.

City State is informed enough to keep insiders on track but is sufficiently accessible for the general reader.

City State (A contemporary history of the City of London and how money triumphed)

By Richard Roberts and David Kynaston

Profile £7.99 (UK)