Call my reaction post-referendum, but William Weintraub’s account of the life and times of Montreal during its heyday reads like a sweet dream. How wonderful to spend several hours in the company of Canada’s most storied and infamous city, being regaled with tales of excess and quirkiness, larger-than-life personalities and older-than-the-hills divisions; how wonderful, in particular, to be immersed so thoroughly in this special place, and still be spared virtually any mention of future implosions and divisive suburban flights and, yes, the contemporary politics of Montreal-as-an-island versus Montreal-as-the-blacksheep-of-Quebec.

The city was, and to an extent still is, that rarity in North America: an urban centre with a defined rhythm and lifestyle. Weintraub makes it his task to cover the social and political history of the 1940s and 50s while at the same time diligently filling in, like a pointillist painter, a luminous picture of how people were born and raised and grew old and died in Montreal. City Unique is written with an effortless sweep, a tribute to both the author’s concise prose and his deep knowledge of, and obvious affection for his subject.

Personalities abound. They range from the fondly remembered, like the eccentric mayor Camillien Houde, who spent years in an internment camp for his opposition to French-Canadian participation in World War II, to the forgotten, such as the brilliant fighter-pilot George Buerling, who couldn’t adjust to peacetime and got himself killed in Israel’s War of Independence, to the later-to-be-famous, like the fearless young journalist Mavis Gallant, who would need to exile herself to Paris to find her voice as a fiction writer, to an equally memorable case of hundreds of regular – and, often enough, decidedly irregular – Montrealers, ranging from whorehouse madames to housewives to frustrated revolutionaries.

Weintraub makes a strong case for the city’s singular vigour during this period, but not at the expense of hiding its internal faultlines. City Unique offers a careful and generally non-judgemental sketch of the island’s various tribes, including the dominant but underempowered French, the rich but fading Anglo-Scots moneyed class, the nouveau Anglos of Westmount, and the city’s vital, and tenacious “third solitude,” the Jews. Even where some personal bias creeps in – the author shows a slight impatience for debutante balls at the Windsor Hotel and an open affection for the delicatessens along The Main – it is genial, not to mention laudable.

Again, call my reaction post-referendum, but I think this is a wonderful book: high spirited and entertaining, just the right mix of analysis and sentiment. Not so unlike Montreal itself, for that matter, at its best.