For over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century. Birmingham has also been a magnet for migration. Indeed, much of British history can be explained, in large measure, with reference to Birmingham. This is a book about figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran Duran, and also about those that everyone ought to have heard of. It captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub - were caught up in the convulsions of social change. Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain does not make sense without it.