Over the course of her distinguished career, Judith Walkowitz has earned a well-deserved reputation as a preeminently innovative historian of the modern urban experience. The publication of her first book, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and State (1980), transformed the study of commercialized sex in the nineteenth century, while her second major work, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (1992), charted how discourses about gender and sexuality served to police the boundaries of propriety and transgression in the late Victorian city. With the publication of Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London, Walkowitz revisits familiar terrain—the late-imperial metropolis. Rather than focusing on the city in its entirety in this book, Walkowitz scrutinizes Soho and its immediate environs in the West End to illustrate how this iconic district functioned between 1890 and 1945 as a “potent incubator of metropolitan change” (3).

Walkowitz clearly embraces interdisciplinarity as a modus operandi in her scholarship. By deftly applying recent theoretical and methodological insights to careful and detailed research, she has produced, in all three of these books, social and cultural histories that possess both analytical precision and compelling narrative force. In Nights Out, Walkowitz incorporates the recent insights of cultural geographers, performance studies practitioners, and historians of consumption to critically examine Soho's spaces and places and the ways in which diverse social actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries negotiated the city's highly commercialized and commodified streets and, by extension, modernity more generally. In so doing, she engages with ideas of cosmopolitanism, which denoted both an avant garde urban culture and interactions between London's increasingly diverse populations (most notably, in this instance, Jews and Italians). In dissecting Soho's cosmopolitan nature and early twentieth-century brand of multicultural tolerance, Walkowitz also notes the ways in which these traits could be either extolled as virtues or denigrated as symbols of social and sexual disorder.

In charting Soho's unique position, Walkowitz mines a range of interesting sources that include (in addition to newspapers and magazines) photographic evidence, oral histories, travel and restaurant guides, theater programs, and London County Council records. This expansive approach allows Walkowitz to paint a picture of Soho that, while not necessarily complete or fully reflective of the district's diversity, nonetheless reveals that this was a zone replete with complex social relations and commercial transactions. It was also characterized by a variety of street styles and performative gestures, ranging from the calls of Jewish schleppers to the expressive dancing of the Edwardian theatrical sensation Maud Allen (chapter 3). In chronicling Soho's history, Walkowitz identifies the porosity of the district's boundaries and the mutability of the meanings attached to it by social observers and local historians (chapter 1), who highlighted, simultaneously, Soho's dangerous sensuality, its role as an industrial backdrop to Oxford Street's consumer spectacles, and its status as a bohemian refuge.

Walkowitz's study is not, however, simply devoted to exploring literary, journalistic, or ethnographic descriptions of Soho. Readers will find some of the rich social historical methodologies showcased in Prostitution and Victorian Society resurfacing in Nights Out. The book is, in fact, at its best when reconstructing the diverse experiences of urban life and consumption that Sohoites pursued in the five decades prior to 1945. As a site of entertainment, Soho was probably most noted for its proximity to the theaters off Shaftesbury Avenue and on Leicester Square, where female bodies were on display and heterosexual and homosexual liaisons occurred, most notably in the promenades of the Alhambra and the Empire, a situation that liberal feminists like Laura Ormiston Chant deemed to be entirely in need of reform (chapter 2).

According to Walkowitz, other institutions in and around Soho were also important to the region's cosmopolitanism. Italian restaurants (chapter 4), particularly those started by the immigrant entrepreneurs Peppino Leoni and Emidio Recchioni, peddled a French-inflected version of Italian food intended to introduce London's cosmopolites to continental traditions while providing them with a flavorful escape from British cooking. The Italian presence in Soho added another ingredient to the cosmopolitan stew in the form of anarchist politics as well as pro- and antifascist activities in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Ethnic mixing as a component of Soho's cosmopolitanism was also displayed in the Berwick Street Market (chapter 5). After the First World War, this area became a primarily plebeian shopping district replete with street-wise, fast-talking, and sharply dressed men and women who enticed beauty conscious working-class women in search of fashionable dresses into largely Jewish-owned businesses and stalls.

The region's status as a site of pleasurable consumption was also reflected in the nightly activities of Sohoites who frequented the cinemas, dance halls, and, most notably, the Lyons’ Corner Houses that dotted West End streets (chapter 6). These social spaces encouraged Soho's Jewish residents, Underground-transported East Enders, and suburban and rural visitors (some of whom were same-sex desiring) to mingle and partake of consumer and theatrical spectacles while engaging with London's growing cosmopolitanism. Clients of Soho's nightclubs and burlesque cabarets found similar pleasures behind the doors of these establishments (chapter 7). Clubs catering, for example, to the city's growing black population and, during the war, to African American GIs (and those white British women who mingled with them) also came in the 1930s and 1940s to function as emblems of modernity and areas of concern for those who deemed interracial mixing dangerous. One final entertainment venue discussed by Walkowitz, the Windmill Theatre (f. 1931), served to counteract some of these anxiety-producing tendencies by staging dance performances and nude tableaux of artistic works that showcased white and British feminine beauty while catering to middlebrow tastes and promoting national unity (chapter 8). Walkowitz carries this story of pleasure closer to the present in an epilogue that discusses postwar trajectories, examining the district's pornography and strip-club economy in the 1960s and 1970s and its branding as a gay village in the 1990s.

Walkowitz's study details, with chronological precision, the rise of Soho as the emblem of London cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century. In so doing, she reminds us of the potential embodied in studies of the city that focus, more tightly, on the particularities of specific urban communities. The author's engagement with theories of cosmopolitanism; painstaking efforts to reconstruct specific episodes in Soho's prewar, interwar, and wartime history; and the scope and originality of her research are to be commended. That said, some readers might find themselves slightly disappointed by the study's narrative coherence. At times, the book reads more like a series of discrete essays than as a seamless historical account of Soho's modernity, its many institutions, and the varied social interactions that it encouraged. A second concern relates to Walkowitz's conceptualizations of the city as a gendered site. While her insights about female performativity and displays of the female body are evocative and wholly appropriate, there is much less here on masculinity/male performativity or the ways in which the male body was displayed on London stages and on Soho streets than one might hope for in a book of this nature. This said, any reader would be hard-pressed to deny this book's sparkling originality or the effectiveness of its insightful and sensitive readings of invaluable source material. As a contribution to the history of London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its importance is very considerable indeed, and, like all of Walkowitz's work, it will undoubtedly prompt numerous discussions and emulative studies seeking to replicate its considerable achievements.