No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin.

Ever since I was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, I haven’t been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered.

Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. It is now the irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating.

I have walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians, architects and archaeologists. I clambered onto a fallen statue of Lenin; rummaged in boxes of early Medieval bones and learned about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city.

 In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.