Muriel Zagha

‘Paris, like many old cities, is saturated with blood.’ The food writer Chris Newens certainly knows how to draw the reader in. A Londoner who has lived in Paris for the past ten years, he sets out to eat his way through all the arrondissements, starting with the 20th and spiralling backwards through the coil of the capital. Each chapter evokes the history and atmosphere of a different neighbourhood and focuses on one dish, which the author then attempts to cook in his authentically cramped Parisian kitchen. Newens, who read anthropology at the LSE, comes from a family that ran a bakery and tearoom for six generations and had their own recipe for the custard tart known as Maid of Honour.

In this odd book, the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper narrates his experience as an expatriate ‘uptight northern European’ living in Paris with his family. His American wife, Pamela Duckerman, also a journalist, is the author of Bringing Up Bébé, a culture-shock memoir about having children in Paris and discovering French child-rearing ways, which are often radically at odds with American ideas and habits. Impossible City touches on some of the same territory (Kuper’s French acculturation through his children’s schooling and socialising), but it aims at a more comprehensive portrayal of rapidly evolving 21st-century Paris, warts and all; or, as he puts it, in a phrase that some may find a little crude, running the gamut ‘from croissants to terrorists’.

‘Bald, overweight and gluttonous’ is how the American journalist and food writer A.J. Liebling described himself. Born in Manhattan in 1904, he wrote extensively about boxing and horse racing and was a war correspondent during the second world war, taking part in the Normandy landings in that capacity. He also recounted his gastronomic adventures in Paris before the war in Between Meals, a collection of essays largely derived from a four-part series, ‘Memoirs of a Feeder in France’, which ran in the New Yorker in 1959.