‘Scintillating . . . fizzes with balletic energy.’ Daily Mail

‘Gripping . . . bursting with extraordinary characters and anecdotes.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘An extraordinary tale, enthrallingly told.’ Gramophone

Such was the credo of the ruthlessly manipulative and resourceful Serge Diaghilev – the Russian impresario who created the modern art form of ballet. Commissioning such legendary names as Nijinsky, Fokine, Stravinsky and Picasso, he produced a series of radically original works that had a revolutionary impact throughout the Western world. Off stage there was scandal and sensation, collaboration and competition, tempestuous affairs and a wild carousel of mayhem.

The Ballet Russes left a matchless artistic legacy, ending with the abrupt death of Diaghilev in 1929. But the achievements of its heroic prime would continue to set the standards for the next era.

The Ballets Russes came to an official end after many vicissitudes with Diaghilev’s abrupt death in 1929. But the achievements of its heroic prime had established a paradigm that would continue to define the terms and set the standards for the next. Published to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev’s birth, Rupert Christiansen – leading critic and self-confessed ‘incurable balletomane’ – presents this freshly researched and challenging reassessment of a unique phenomenon, exploring passionate conflicts and outsize personalities in a story embracing triumph and disaster.

‘This really is an impressive book’ Sebastian Faulks.

‘Brisk, vivid and unexpectedly stirring … No one writes as evocatively and entertainingly about Paris as Christiansen does’Mail on Sunday.

‘Every page is a pleasure, every building, every gas lamp brought shimmering to life … Don’t board the Eurostar without a copy’The Times.

‘A wonderful book, amazingly vivid … But also a truly original work of scholarship’ Theodore Zeldin.

In 1853 the French emperor Louis Napoleon inaugurated a vast and ambitious programme of public works, directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine. Haussmann’s renovation of Paris would transform the old medieval city of squalid slums and disease-ridden alleyways into a ‘City of Light’ – characterised by wide boulevards, apartment blocks, parks, squares and public monuments, new railway stations and department stores and a new system of public sanitation.

City of Light charts a fifteen-year project of urban renewal which – despite the interruptions of war, revolution, corruption and bankruptcy – would set a template for nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban planning and create the enduring and globally familiar layout of modern Paris.