Maureen Waller: 1700 - Scenes from London Life

Sceptre

$29.95

As packed, teeming and colourful as London itself, this book is stuffed with the noise, smells and people of what was the most magnificent city in Europe 300 years ago.

Whether she's describing the streets, homes, workplaces or coffee houses, Waller's history sparkles with vivid life or heaves with death and putridity.

Travellers were warned of their imminent arrival by the overwhelming stink, she writes.

Mounds of sewage were dumped along the roads by the night-soil men and competed with the aroma of more than half a million unwashed bodies, animal carcasses and the decomposing bodies of the poor, which lay in pits not covered by earth until they had reached their quota of corpses.

Much about these people's lives seems strange to us now, although some things - social division based on money, a population-wide obsession with fashion, the coffee-house as second home - never change.

Waller's writing is lively and utterly fascinating.