Somewhere Becoming Rain Clive James

Clive James visits Rio de Janeiro, where the poor live by their wits in the city's favelas while wealthy Cariocas live in a world that is very different, making contact with their less fortunate neighbours only when a servant is paid or a millionaire is mugged.

Clive James returns to Paris, the city calls his spiritual home. As a young man he wondered how to meet the women of Paris. This time he does, including writers, models and actresses.

Clive James explores how to succeed in Los Angeles by learning the secret of the film business from Hollywood experts, advisers to the stars and the celebrities themselves.

Clive James visits the bustling city of Bombay. Pursued by beggars, he makes his escape to Bollywood, where he finds stunt work in a costume epic. He also watches a street dentist and visits a roadside astrologer.

Clive visits the Windy City and finds there is a lot more to Chicago than memories of Al Capone and the St Valentine's Day Massacre. The people are surprisingly forthright about the problems of living in a city where millions of dollars change hands at the board of trade, but little is done to solve the problems of gang violence in the housing projects where shootings are a daily event.

Clive takes a light-hearted look at the German capital, revealing the huge changes that have taken place there since reunification - architecturally, socially and culturally. He mingles with the weird and wonderful youth of the city, keeps a last appointment at the notorious border-crossing Checkpoint Charlie, and eventually finds himself cold-shouldered off the road by former East Berliners in convertibles.

Clive sets out to find out about a city that was once known as the Paris of the East and discovered China on the brink of revolution. As demonstrating students joined three million cyclists to clog the streets, he encounters a once-wealthy socialite who survived the Cultural Revolution, a baby-washing entrepreneur, a local eel-gutter and a jazz band playing Jingle Bells on an empty ferry cruising up the Huangpu River.