We'll Always Have Paris: Sex And Love In The City Of Light [Idioma Inglés] - Tapa dura

For more than a century, Americans and Britons have been arriving hopefully in Paris. Most were tourists, but a significant number had other motives, ranging from learning to paint or write, to finding a rich husband; from escaping racism and politics to gaining a sexual education. John Baxter arrived because he had fallen in love with a French woman. All of these people arrived because they were re-making their lives.

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS is a personal view of Paris as it appeared to the emotionally and intellectually hungry of the world. It is a guided tour of the people and places associated with the Parisian legend. It includes interviews with painters, film-makers, actresses, writers, poets. There are visits to the cafes of Montparnasse where Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Man Ray hung out. It explores the old brothels - temples of sensuality in 18th century Paris - and an erotic bookshop. Above all, it is John Baxter's personal history of Europe's most romantic capital city.

‘We’ll always have Paris,’ Humphrey Bogart tells Ingrid Bergman. ‘We lost it for a while, but we found it here again, in Casablanca.’

For more than a century, Americans and Britons have made their way to Paris in the hope of experiencing what these classic lovers found. Most were tourists, but many had other motives, from discovering art to finding a romantic husband or a rich wife; from escaping political persecution to gaining a sex education.

In a gossipy blend of hearsay and fact, Baxter takes us behind the scenes of the vibrant, all-night show that is Paris. A visit to the literary cafés of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and de Beauvoir is quickly followed by an extensive tour to the parts most guidebooks leave out. These include famous brothels of the Thirties such as the Sphinx, patronized by Marlene Dietrich and Duke Ellington, and Le Chabanais, where Salvador Dalí sated his fantasies, and where Edward VII kept a sumptuous champagne bath for his favourite girls.

We slip into erotic bookshops, gawp at the film vaults of the Cinémathèque Française, climb into rooftop apartments, then descend into the city’s bone-lined catacombs, where a sign reads, “Here Begins the Empire of Death”.

Interleaving his own experience of falling in love, John Baxter offers us an alternative cultural tour. His unique and idiosyncratic bank of knowledge of films, books and the visual arts provides a witty and audacious insight into Europe’s most romantic capital. You will never see Paris in quite the same way again.