Alistair Horne takes the history of the city and breaks it down to seven distinct ages, with a foreword taking in Julius Caesar to Philip-Augustus, the great rival of Richard the Lionheart, and an epilogue taking in France since 1968. In between, Horne tells the huge and romantic story of a city constantly in turmoil and change in the middle ages, through the 100 years war, the Paris of Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Commune, the Empire days of Louis-Napoleon and Eugenie, the First World War and De Gaulle. He interweaves historical narrative with telling detail, and social and cultural history.This is destined to be a definitive work on the subject by one of the great historians of France.