In this ground-breaking history of world architecture, Barnabas Calder takes us on a dazzling tour of some of the most astonishing buildings of the past fifteen thousand years, from Uruk, via Ancient Rome and Victorian Liverpool, to China's booming megacities. He reveals how every building - from the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Damascus to a typical Georgian house - was influenced by the energy available to its architects, and why this matters.

In the Guardian, Rowan Moore wrote: "Calder’s book is partly a hymn or elegy to the world that fossil fuels made, partly a warning of the disasters they are bringing. It is strongest in its descriptions of the growth of industrial Liverpool, the city in whose university the author works. It tells of the docks, warehouses, pubs, housing and education buildings made possible by coal. Also of the aesthetics of the new industrial wealth, both embracing new technology and harking back to the styles of great buildings of the past. It describes a beautiful Lake District house which, despite its architect’s dedication to traditional arts and crafts, was reliant on the money his client made selling beer from coal-powered breweries to workers in coal-powered factories, as well as on the coal-powered trains with which he could get to this idyllic spot."