Let’s look at some of your book choices, which show these different elements of Paris. First up on your list is Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell.

That is a book I read when I was young – in my teens – and it really marked me. I had been to Paris in the 1970s and I was fascinated by the city but slightly underwhelmed. I knew Rome very well and other European cities and when I spent time in Paris I thought it was an awful lot more modern and tame than I expected.

Reading Orwell’s book suggested to me that there was a Paris underworld. I knew about an underworld in America, because I grew up in big cities like San Francisco, and lived in New York. I knew that America had a very tough side to it. I didn’t imagine before coming here that Paris had a very gritty real underside. Reading that book I discovered it. I also discovered that the Paris Orwell knew in the 1920s and early 1930s was very much still alive in the 1970s and in many ways is still alive today.

That is interesting, because when I think of Paris I think of that amazing artistic scene with people like Hemingway, Picasso and Chanel. Are people still trying to replicate that even today?

Oh, absolutely very much so, especially Americans. There are also many British people over here and also South Americans, Africans and Italians. Paris for them is the same city that it was for Orwell and that it was for me. It is a place that you can come to and when here convince yourself that you too might be able to become the person you wanted to be, or you could at least try to. You can do things like paint or write. One of the great things about Paris, then as now, is that if you are a writer or an artist or indeed a creator of any kind you are respected. Your status is actually perfectly high in society and you are not necessarily measured on your material success, how many books you sell, how much your paintings sell for – that sort of thing. Whereas in the culture I come from in America you are largely measured on how much money you earn, the neighbourhood you live in and the kind of car you drive. It was refreshing to me and I think it still is.

But Orwell’s book doesn’t just show the artistic side of Paris. There is a long section about working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and it really shows the grimness and filth of that life. He describes how people were basically wage slaves. They worked horrific hours – 16, 17, 18-hour days – and they had no energy to do anything but to work and sleep. My experience, as someone who has done a lot of reporting on food and restaurants, is that that scene has improved but it is still pretty gritty. People work very long, hard hours and are poorly paid and now they are almost entirely non-French. They are almost entirely North African or Tamil.

Your next book shows another gritty side of Paris, after World War I, and it is Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

This is another book I read when I was very young and like my first choice I was impressed by the fact that Paris was a real city and had this underground quality to it. There could be really deeply subversive people living and working and creating here. I was particularly fascinated by Céline’s portrait of the city because Paris is one of the characters in the book. You get a real sense of what Paris looked like. Céline walked everywhere. He was a mad walker. He came from the suburbs and he lived and worked around Clichy and Courbevoie, which is a very rough suburb nowadays. He would go in and out of town and walk back and forth in many of the places that Henry Miller then lived in and walked around.

It just so happens that when I first moved to Paris I lived for a year not far from Place de Clichy and I found myself going to the same places and seeing the same kinds of scenes described in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and they really seemed to be current.

What kinds of scenes were they?

People hanging out in cafés and drinking madly and living much of their lives in a public sphere, outside on the streets. People often had such miserable little apartments and unheated garrets and suchlike, places that didn’t have proper bathrooms and showers, that when not at work they would spend a huge amount of time loitering or in cafés, at tables on the street. They were also discussing all sorts of things very animatedly, things that had you talked about them in many places in America you would have been considered a public danger or a marginal character or a crazy person. For example, in Paris it is considered completely normal to call yourself a communist whether you truly understand what it means to be one or not. And that was certainly not the case until not so long ago in the United States. Paris was a lot more liberal than America – you could talk about anything and say anything and that was considered completely normal.