His curiosity towards strangers he meets is guided by twin questions that have followed him to every city: “What is it like to be born here, I wondered, and what it is like to die here?

o read Of Cities & Women is to wander through a city in search of an “open space, a privileged place where the free line of the horizon creates a pure pleasure.”

cities give us maps to examine our lives

Moving through the city becomes an intimate, philosophical way for Julius to metabolise his emotions about race, belonging and memory.

when you're often reminded that the country in which you live will never fully embrace you as its citizen, when your movement between frontiers has been conditional for most of your life, you develop an embodied understanding of how you occupy space in places and move with a unique sense of awareness and respect

It is the writer in dialogue with the city – its history, its art, its inhabitants, the ambient conflict in the streets. It is writing that is searching, that can hold space for ambivalence, and uncertainty.

but writing that has an unmistakable sense of texture of a place.

Some of the most compelling writing on travel and cities is not gesturing towards what to see but rather how to see - how to turn consciousness into context, meditation into meanin