This book is not a book on weight loss. Nor is there any guarantee that it will improve your job prospects or family relationships.

Anyone who has read any of the three works collected here (Historias de Londres, 1999; Historias de Nueva York, 2006; Historias de Roma, 2010) already knows that these are chronicles which resist easy categorisation, neither entirely humorous nor entirely melancholic, and which comprise the intimate biography of some wonderful cities.

This book is also, in a way, the biography of a man who had the good fortune to live in them and to meet extraordinary people.