Isolarion

'I have written much about the streets of Oxford myself, but seldom so perceptively or interestingly as Attlee. Anyone who can drag Lucretius, Susanna, Bathsheba and St. Jerome into a Cowley Road porn shop deserves our attention and admiration'Colin DexterIsolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail - and in that detail finds a greater truth. For James Attlee, that detail is Oxford's Cowley Road, a teeming, multicultural area of commerce, culture and diversity. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, it has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist or student Oxford. What it presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic slice of life that reflects the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first century city.'Unique and very special...Residents of East Oxford can be proud to have this eccentric advocate and eloquent traveller in their midst'Guardian'An iridescent picture of a new Oxford that no guide book has yet captured'New York Times