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At first blush, the subtitle A Cultural and Literary History implies a weighty tome aimed at an intellectual audience, but this impression is misleading. Rather, it is meant to convey the idea that cultural artefacts—architecture, painting, literature, poetry—are parts of a mosaic which can only be apprehended properly when placed in an appropriate historical context. Divorced from that, they may still have inherent beauty or rhetorical power, but the under-informed viewer or reader is less able to comprehend their most profound aspects, namely what they mean for the society that created them.

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Nicholas T. Parsons'
history of the guidebook, Worth the Detour, was published in 2007. His volume Vienna. A Cultural and Literary History in the Cities of the Imagination series is at press.