Tales of Two Cities by Jonathan Conlin, review Conlin airily demolishes this notion, beginning in the 1820s and 1830s with the English quadrille. For those of us who enjoy costume drama, it is familiar from the Jane Austen adaptations where characters process solemnly through its measures, ponderously flirting as they perform its stately steps. Little connection, one would think, to the wild, bacchante-like shudderings of the (possibly knickerless) fin-de-siècle Jane Avril and her colleagues at the Moulin Rouge. Yet, as Conlin shows, the British quadrille became a craze at the guinguettes, the working-class cafés-cum-dancehalls outside Paris's city walls, interspersed with a show-stopping strut-and-shake interlude for the male customers, a solo moment in the group performed for the admiration of others. Soon professionals took over these virtuoso moments, extending them into contortionists" turns on the music-hall stage - not in France, but in England, the home of music-hall. Then English dancer Kate Vaughan added in her magic skirt dance, and the provocative "French" dance was on its way. This tracking back and forth between the two cities is typical of Conlin's inclusive eye, whether he concentrates on the relation between maps and reality, or literature and imagination. In his triumphant chapter on detective fiction, he ties together the development of street lighting, a new kind of journalism, street reportage, the fall of the Bastille, the creation of the police force, Cuvier's geological research (yes, really), as well as the better charted pathway from Edgar Allan Poe through Gaboriau to Conan Doyle. Similarly, Conlin turns his eye onto the living conditions of the people. London and Paris were now the largest cities that had ever existed, and as their populations grew, they were forced to deal not merely with the living, but also with the dead. City churchyard burials had become impossible for reasons of health and sanitation, and now new "garden" cemeteries were developed on the edges of town, whether at Père Lachaise in Paris, or at Kensal Green in London, both laid out in imitation of 18th-century noblemen's parks. In the 18th century, rich city-dwellers had made day-trips to the countryside, or had taken up residence in fashionable rural retreats on the edges of the cities, but only with the arrival of public transport in the 19th century did suburban living become a possibility for the masses. Garden cemeteries had already grappled with the problems of transport (the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company had its own branch-line to its cemetery in Woking), and by the time architects were planning garden suburbs - whether Milton Keynes or Hampstead Garden Suburb - these garden cemeteries were an unspoken (indeed often unconscious) source, although as Conlin drily notes, the cemeteries were generally more socially inclusive. This dry tone and slightly raised-eyebrow attitude has much to recommend it. Conlin is a fine and original researcher, mining nuggets of gold from the most unlikely sources, but he is also wryly amused by the follies of our ancestors, and by our own. There is, he shows, nothing simple about history. To imagine we are all one thing, or another, is to delude ourselves. The best ideas are always somebody else's. Each chapter of this deceptively accessible book can be read as a self-contained essay, a bright light shone onto a specific area of cultural engagement. Or, read straight through, Tales of Two Cities allows readers to reconsider what "everybody knows." For, with astonishing ease, Jonathan Conlin performs that most useful, and difficult, of tasks: he makes us see the familiar as though it were new. Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Birth of the Modern City Jonathan Conlin Atlantic, £25, 320pp Read on 1 Talking About Detective Fiction by PD James (2009). The great British crime-writer on the history of the genre - and her favourites. 2 The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser (1992). Why do we eat what we do, when we do, and how we do? 3 Necropolis by Catharine Arnold (2006). From Roman burial sites to Victorian crematoria: where we all end.