In Modern Times, Modern Places, the noted critic Peter Conrad - ranging among literature, the visual arts, music and the performing arts, science, and psycho-analysis - connects these disparate areas and sees the modern era as a whole.

Taking his cue from the declaration of the Italian futurists that time and space had been abruptly killed off by Einstein's time-space continuum, Conrad investigates the notion and the nature of modern times: the justified conviction that we have lived through a unique testing period in the experience of mankind. He also describes the places that have been frontiers of modernity - cities like Vienna, Moscow, Paris, and Berlin; new worlds in the Americas; a preview of a possible future in Tokyo.