Paris attracts writers like Hollywood does actors, resulting in billions of pages about the city. Englishman Stephen Clarke’s novel A Year in the Merde became a word-of-mouth bestseller in Paris a few years ago, and his latest, Talk to the Snail, is a non-fiction work which serves up his humorous observations on the French. American journalist Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon is a compilation of his New Yorker magazine dispatches as well as hitherto unpublished journal entries which reveal an American family’s five-year love affair with the city.

Michelin’s Guide Rouge is still the bible for French cuisine, to the extent that some restaurants’ fortunes have been made and others’ downfalls precipitated by the simple addition or subtraction of a star in this book.