At first sight Washington and Berlin might seem to be capital cities that have little in common, beyond long, straight avenues, classical architecture, a profusion of monuments, and the fact that both only became national capitals in the face of considerable opposition. And indeed many of the contributors to this volume of conference papers struggle to make the connections. In some cases a pair of papers is placed side by side, and readers are left to draw their own conclusions. For instance interesting contributions by Belinda Davis and Lucy Barber relate respectively to protests in Berlin and Washington. Berliners have been a rebellious people, at least since the time of the 1848 revolution, and marches, clashes with police and sometimes street-fighting have been regular occurrences. Washington on the other hand has been significant as the place to which demonstrators came from other parts of the USA to give publicity to their protests, though as Barber shows, this tradition has only been in operation since 1894. Before that restrictions on protests in the nation's capital were successfully imposed, the argument being that these were an illegitimate form of pressure on Congress. Other topics include the standardisation of time in the later nineteenth century, parks and holocaust memorials. There is also considerable attention given to the controversies surrounding the selection of these cities as national capitals, and the tensions between the needs and wishes of the people living in the capital and those of central government. The quality of the papers is good, but the volume as a whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts. The highlight of the volume for me was Carl Abbott's chapter on ‘National capitals in a networked world’ which solves the problems of how to make meaningful comparison by placing both cities within a system of classifying ‘international cities’ according to their economic, political and cultural functions and their national and international role. In some ways the trajectories of the two cities have been quite different. Washington has seen a huge growth both in population and in economic as well as political significance since World War II and now claims to be ‘the information capital of the world’. In the same period Berlin, once a ‘world city’, has declined severely in economic significance and has stagnated in population, while remaining one of the world's most important intellectual and cultural centres. None of the papers gives any attention to the role of national capitals as religious centres or (in the case of Berlin) as centres of secularism. Indeed the only contribution that even considers religion in a broader sense, and it is indeed one of the most interesting, is that by Dietmar Schirmer on ‘State, Volk and monumental architecture in Nazi-era Berlin’. He notes similarities between much of the architecture in the two cities, arguing that what is now seen as ‘Fascist architecture’ was in most respects typical of monumental building of the 1920s and '30s, in democratic as much as in Fascist (or indeed Communist) countries. He goes on to argue (quoting Benedict Anderson) that ‘the dawn of the age of nationalism’ was ‘the dusk of religious modes of thought’, and that monumental nationalist architecture was a means of compensating for declining faith in individual mortality by asserting the immortality of the nation. The peculiar feature, he suggests, of the National Socialist form of nationalism and thus of the architecture which expresses it, was that the Volksgemeinschaft ‘survives not despite but because of its dead; it feeds upon them and thrives on account of them’ (p 144). This argument overlooks the many writers since Anderson who have shown how nationalism often flourished most in alliance with rather than in opposition to traditional religion. But it has the advantage of stressing what was distinctive in the Nazi vision and thus counterbalancing the tendency in recent literature to overstate the continuities between Nazism and Christianity.