John Ardagh , France Today (Penguin). Comprehensive journalistic overview, covering food, film, education and holidays as well as politics and education. Good on detail about the urban suburbs and the shift there from the centre of Paris. 

Roland Barthes , Mythologies and Selected Writings (both Vintage/Noonday). The first, though dated, is a classic: a brilliant description of how the ideas, prejudices and contradictions of French thought and behaviour manifest themselves, in food, wine, cars, travel guides and other cultural offerings. Barthes' piece on the Eiffel Tower doesn't appear, but it's included in the Selected Writings , published in the US by Noonday as A Barthes Reader (ed Susan Sontag). 

Simone de Beauvoir , The Second Sex (Vintage). One of the prime texts of Western feminism, written in 1949, covering women's inferior status in history, literature, mythology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and everyday life. 

Denis Belloc , Slow Death in Paris (Quartet, UK). A harrowing account of a heroin addict in Paris. Not recommended holiday reading, but if you want to know about the seamy underbelly of the city, this is the book. 

James Campbell , Paris Interzone (Minerva, UK). The feuds, passions and destructive lifestyles of the Left Bank writers of 1946-60 are evoked here. The cast includes Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Boris Vian, Alexander Trocchi, Eugene Ionesco, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Nabokov and Allan Ginsberg. 

Richard Cobb , Paris and Elsewhere (ed David Gilmour; John Murray, UK). Selected writings by the acclaimed historian of the 1789 Revolution reveal his unique encounter with the French. 

Robert Cole , A Traveller's History of Paris (Windrush Press/Interlink). This brief history of the city from the first Celtic settlement to today is an ideal starting point for those wishing to delve into the historical archives. 

Christopher Flood and Laurence Bell (eds), Political Ideologies in Contemporary France (Pinter/Cassell). Beginners' guide to the current political trends in France. 

Gisèle Halim , Milk for the Orange Tree (Quartet). Born in Tunisia, daughter of an Orthodox Jewish family, Halim ran away to Paris to become a lawyer defending women's rights, Algerian FLN fighters and all unpopular causes. A gutsy autobiographical story. 

Tahar Ben Jelloun , Racism Explained to my Daughter (New Press). An honest and straightforward account of the racial tensions in France as seen through the eyes of its Moroccan-born author. An international best-seller. 

Peter Lennon , Foreign Correspondents: Paris in the Sixties (Picador/McClelland & Stewart). Irish journalist Peter Lennon went to Paris in the early 1960s unable to speak a word of French. He became a close friend of Samuel Beckett and was a witness to the May 1968 events. 

François Maspero , Roissy Express (Blackwell/W. W. Norton & Co.) with photographs by Anaïk Frantz. A "travel book" along the RER line B from Roissy to St-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse (excluding the Paris stops). Brilliant insights into the life of the Paris suburbs, and fascinating digressions into French history and politics. 

Andrea Kupfer Schneider , Creating the Musée d'Orsay: The Politics of Culture in France (Pennsylvania State UP). Interesting and sometimes amusing account of the struggles involved in transforming the Gare d'Orsay into one of Paris's most visited museums. An original insight, revealing French attitudes towards such grand cultural projects. 

Tyler Stovall , Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Marnier/Houghton Mifflin). A well-researched and vivid account of the flight of African-American artists in the 1920s from a segregated and racist America to a welcoming Paris. 

Tad Szulc , Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (Da Capo). While musicologists may be disappointed by the lack of discussion of the works that made Chopin famous, others will revel in this exploration of his relationship with his friends - Balzac, Hugo, Liszt among them - and his lover, George Sand and their shared life in Paris. 

William Wiser , The Great Good Place (o/p). An account of American expat women in Paris, from the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, through to writer Edith Wharton, publisher Caresse Crosby, the sad socialite novelist's wife Zelda Fitzgerald and finally the singer Josephine Baker. 

Theodore Zeldin , The French (Harvill). A coffee-table book without the pictures, based on the author's conversations with a wide range of people, about money, sex, phobias, parents and everything else.