Edmund White moved to Paris from New York, aged 43 in 1983, with no spoken French. He was already feted for The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) and A Boy's Own Story (1982), he had had thousands of lovers, but in Paris, initially, he knew just two people. One of them, Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, the wife of the son of the creator of Babar the Elephant, became White's Parisian mentor, passionate friend and cultural conduit.

In his new book, Inside a Pearl (his second volume about the city), White dazzles his readers with anecdotes about the rich and brilliant people he met in Marie-Claude's orbit and through his work for American Vogue: Yves Saint Laurent, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Foucault, Milan Kundera etc. In loose, candid, conversational prose, he pokes fond fun at himself, reminiscing about the moustache he shaved and the better clothes he bought soon after arriving in the capital city of chic. In the tradition of Mary McCarthy and other literary Americans who fell in love with Paris, White hones witty cross-cultural comparisons. But beneath the effervescence are darker contrasts in the cultural responses to Aids on both sides of the Atlantic.