‘Well, I always liked Madrid!’ is my father’s verdict on the city; a verbal shrug that manages both to damn with faint praise and gesture at a powerful, unspoken criticism. There is some truth in both: Madrid often finds herself crowded out of ‘Great Cities of the World’ lists and has struggled to win top billing as a tourist attraction, even within Spain itself. The perpetual bridesmaid, despite her official capital status (hello Ottawa, Ankara, and Canberra), she has long been forced to hold the glittering train of Gaudí’s Barcelona. It has taken the zeal and outsider’s gaze of a convert – the accomplished Australian writer and honorary madrileño, Luke Stegemann – to draw her from the shadows in a self-described ‘expression of love … and act of recovery’.

While you won’t find a specific shelf-header devoted to them, ‘city biographies’ have become a definite literary sub-genre. Not quite at home alongside the salty self-discoveries and epic voyages of travel writing, but not straightforwardly works of history or geography either, books such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The biography (2000), Colin Jones’s Paris: Biography of a city (2004), and Jan Morris’s Venice (1960) used to fox me as a bookseller on shelving duty. All are natural heirs to the alchemical shift of modernism (and later, the psychogeographies of postmodernism), when the metropolis ceased being conceived as a passive backdrop to our lives, and became a shifting, acting protagonist in itself. To attempt an epoch-spanning cultural project like this is ambitious; it takes a prodigious amount of research (and translation in this case), but also demands its subject be treated with the reverence and attention one would offer a living being. You have to fall in love – or already be in love – with your city-organism. It is clear from Stegemann’s purposeful, passionate homage that he is as devoted a lover as they come.