From Publishers Weekly: Olsen's thesis is that these three European capitals were each deliberately conceived as a unified work of art to reinforce the values of the dominant class and to serve their leisure pursuits. This is "a delightful and gripping, richly illustrated social history," noted PW.

From Library Journal: A sweeping comparative analysis of three great European metropolises in the 19th century, equally concerned with ordinary social life and monumental civic life. Olsen, author of two earlier books on the growth of London, mines with a cultivated air an English vein of writing about architecture, rendering his subject matter as a document of history and society and scattering drawing room references to T.S. Eliot and Edith Wharton. He interprets the city not as a department store of bourgeois consumption, the "product" of industrialization, but rather as a vessel of civilization itself, a theater of historicist consciousness. This is a major statement on the 19th-century city, destined to be a landmark in the fields of urban and planning history. Peter S. Kaufman, Suffolk Community Coll. Lib., Selden, N.Y.