Madrid, one of Europe’s largest cities, deserves more appreciation

ROME HAS captured the imagination for millennia, London and Paris for centuries, and Berlin for decades. But another major European capital has attracted similar attention only in recent years. “Madrid” by Luke Stegemann, an Australian historian, aims to explain why the Spanish capital’s profile is rising. This is not the first English-language history of the city, but in a curiously thin field, it is the most ambitious chronicle of a city elbowing its way to Europe’s front rank.