The irrepressible Norman Davies returns with yet another weighty tome. This time he is aided by his former student Roger Moorhouse, who also assisted with Davies's The Isles: A History. Such is the ambition of Microcosm that Davies enlisted the research skills of a further 60 specialists, which may leave you wondering whether this compendious book is itself best read in teams.

The city in question is Wroclaw in Silesia, west Poland, now a thriving university city 190km south-west of Warsaw and 160km from the German border. Wroclaw's location in the corridor of central Europe, 'the lands in-between', granted it a position on the busiest east-west trade routes, and since its origination in the eighth century the city has attracted a relentless flow of migrants, and no end of trouble. 

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