The superlative exuberance of Barcelona finds a happy match in the wide-open mind and energised, earthy prose of Robert Hughes. This Australian Renaissance Man (The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, American Visions) has an enviable capacity to absorb huge and complex subjects and spread them out before his readers with coherence, grace and humour. His art critic's eye is naturally drawn to the city's cornucopia of artists and architects - Gaudi, Picasso, Miro, Puig y Cadafalch - but he sets them confidently in the context of a highly political metropolis. He has an outsider's empathy with Catalonia's cultural battle against the often crass and brutal centralism of Madrid, but he is clear-sighted in recognising that Catalan nationalism also has its flaws. He gazes boldly across two millenniums to root Barcelona in the fullness of its history, but he focuses up close on the last 150 years, when many of the city's most familiar landmarks were created. It is its people, however, as much as its streets and cathedrals, that he brings so vividly into our field of vision. This is a bulky book, but it reads easily, though never glibly.