Nineteenth-century Britain became interested in biblical and other cities for two reasons. Growing industrialisation meant that more and more people were living in cities and this stimulated interest in what ancient cities would have been like. Secondly, it was hoped that excavations of biblical cities would produce evidence that would confirm the historical accuracy of the Bible. Cities of God contains chapters on Troy, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Pithom (a store city connected with the Hebrew slaves in Egypt), Babylon, Sodom, Bethlehem, Ephesus and Rome. Accounts are given of what explorers, travellers, archaeologists, artists, writers and photographers found when they visited these places in the nineteenth century (the location of Sodom, of course, was problematic), how excavations progressed, how results were fed back to the British public, and what the reactions were. The result is an usually wide and informative coverage of topics that have been well investigated in the past, in such a way that even readers familiar with the field will find much that they did not know. The book is well documented bibliographically, and it also contains many interesting illustrations. This reviewer had never before seen the drawing by General Gordon of Khartoum which led him to identify the so-called Garden Tomb in Jerusalem. If there is a weakness, it is the lack of first-hand familiarity with German biblical and archaeological scholarship. The decipherment of cuneiform is described without any reference to G. F. Grotefend, and to summarise German higher critics as wanting to ‘decompose books of the Bible into oral and documentary traditions and then to reassemble them into secularized histories of religious thought’ (p. 4) is a crude misrepresentation. This apart, the book is to be warmly welcomed, and readers will be richly rewarded as they peruse its pages.