Tel Aviv gleamed like a jewel beneath us as we landed at Ben Gurion Airport at night and went through Israeli border control. “Who invited you to Israel? And your wife, what does she do?” I had not been back to Israel since 1981. In Jerusalem, half an hour away by train, we unpacked at

Serotonin By Michel Houellebecq, William Heinemann, 309pp, £20/$27 Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist and professional contrarian, delights in puncturing metro-liberal orthodoxies and shocking the reader with descriptions of internet pornography, pill-popping, sex tourism, the plight of the modern male and other aspects of urban anomie. Though not for the faint-hearted, Houellebecq is admired in France

Chanel’s Riviera: Life, Love and Struggle for Survival on the Côte d’Azur 1930-1944 By Anne de Courcy Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 304pp, £20/$24.50 Ever since Coco Chanel launched her best-selling perfume, Chanel No 5, almost a century ago in 1921, French fragrance has acquired a mystique all of its own. Chanel’s abstract, imperiously powdery parfum changed

Collected Poems By Marius Kociejowski Carcanet, 99pp, £12.95/$18.99 The literary travelogue – with elements of history, anthropology, personal experience and quest – is a difficult genre. In the absence of conventional plot, the challenge is to create a forward momentum, something that Bruce Chatwin, say, or WG Sebald were notably skilled at doing. Marius Kociejowski,

In May 2015, some 200 members of PEN America, a respected literary organisation to which many writers belong, decided not to present the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris with a newly established Freedom of Expression Courage Award. While not everyone admired the satirical French magazine’s crude cartoons and mockery of aspects of

Fellini’s Eternal Rome By Alessandro Carrera Bloomsbury, 186pp, £65/$80 No film conjured so memorably the flashbulb glitz and moral darkness of Italy’s post-war “economic miracle” as Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. A box-office triumph in 1960, it launched Marcello Mastroianni as the world-weary matinee idol, and Anita Ekberg as a Swedish diva-in-furs. Beneath the roseate

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume II Edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Krull, Faber and Faber, 1,025pp, £35/$35 Since her suicide in the winter of early 1963, Sylvia Plath has been squabbled over by feminists who claim her as a martyr to their cause, literary critics who see her as one of the most

Soho in the Eighties by Christopher Howse, bloomsbury, 266pp, £20 Soho in the 1970s, with its strip joints and steamed-up caffs, was an exciting place for a teenager to explore. I used to play truant there from my school south of the river. The sex industry was then at its peak as the vice barons