THERE is no shortage of books about York; whether tourist guides celebrating the city's beauty, crime novels with York as a backdrop, or - most commonly - histories.

Leonard Markham's new book York: A City Revealed still manages to justify its place on the bookshelves, however. It is an individual and surprisingly readable tour through some of York's history, with individual chapters on everything from the less-than-holy antics of some of our former Archbishops to York races, Hitler's reasons for ordering the Baedeker raid and some of our most notorious ghosts.

Then there is Swiss confectioner Frederick Belmont, who came to England to seek his fortune in the early 20th Century unable to speak even a word of English, ended up in Yorkshire by mistake, and went on to found .Bettys, the most English of all English tearooms.

The book, pictured inset above, also has a wealth of photos - many taken by The Press photographers in the last 80 years or so - to stir the memories. Here, we reproduce just a few: a police sergeant holding back the crowds during a 1938 cup-tie involving York City; the smouldering ruins of St Martin's Church in Coney Street in the aftermath of the Baedeker raid; the St Peter's School pageant group, pictured in 1909; and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, standing amid the rubble in the south transept of York Minster following the devastating fire of 1984.

The cover shows Shambles in the 1950s - an evocative image that acts as a perfect gateway into the book itself, and into the history and mysteries it contains.

Stephen Lewis * York: A City Revealed by Leonard Markham is published by Sutton, priced £14.99