The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, but it is also the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town in the Judaean hills.
Jerusalem is often regarded as the centre of the world, the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths, the setting for Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations.
This is an all-engrossing book. Drawing on extensive reading and a lifetime's study, Montefiore reveals this ever- changing city through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women - kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores - who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem.
Even today, all that the book says in its 700+ pages has been turned upside down in the aftermath of 7 October. And the situation is still evolving.
Religious, political and media interest feed on each other to make Jerusalem more intensely scrutinized today than ever before.
Jerusalem is the Holy City, yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry; the desire and prize of empires, yet of no strategic
value, the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone, a city of many names.
Prophets poets and patriarchs, Abraham, David, Jesus and Muhammad are said to have trodden these very stones.
My family visited Jerusalem twice in as many years (and one of us went three times, coming back three days before 7 October).
We enjoyed it hugely - it was the time of the Feast of Tabernacles and there were masses of visitors from the US.
At no time did we feel threatened not even when our driver took us on a long detour through the West Bank from Nazareth to Jerusalem.
You get used to seeing girl soldiers with a machine gun slung at the back, having no idea what was about to happen.
But visitors to Jerusalem must beware: practically none of the sights is as described - the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, is not part of the Temple; I have my doubts about the Holy Sepulchre, though I don't subscribe to the alternative site proposed by the Evangelicals.
That is why this book is essential reading for it puts everything in its historical perspective.
It shows how the historical background evolved, not as linear as many would like.
The ending of the book might be a surprise to those unacquainted with Jerusalem: it describes minutely what happens inside the Holy Sepulchre from 4am onwards, how the different religions and cults alternate with each other as they greet the new day. Many times it ends in fighting.
In his last visit before he died, the eminent scholar Edward Said wrote: (The Holy Sepulchre is) "an alien, unattractive, run-down place full of frumpy middle-aged tourists milling about in a decrepit, ill-lit area where Copts, Greeks, Armenians and other Christian sects nurture their unattractive ecclesiastical gardens in sometimes open combat with each other".
Most visitors have it pointed out to them, a little ladder belonging to the Armenians on the balcony outside the right-hand window in the facade of the church which, the tour guides say, can never be moved without other sects seizing it.
Much progress is being made in understanding of the archaeology of Jerusalem especially since the whole city came under Israeli hands and experts could find out many of the secrets buried under the detritus of centuries of wars.
Yet mutual suspicion remains paramount. Once someone started a rumour that an escape tunnel was being dug to lead from Palestine to Malta.
The Muslims still fear that the Israelites want to rebuild the Temple but this would require the pulling down of the Al Aqsa Mosque, one of the three most important holy places of the Islamic religion, since these are on the same footprint.
The aftermath of 7 October has strengthened Israeli hold on the city and the erection of so many high-rise buildings that are becoming a wholescale ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin and Arab homesteads of past centuries.
This is something that has never happened in the history of the city.