He talks of visiting Shakespeare & Co., a book shop and library owned by Sylvia Beach. He writes how he would walk up Rue Mouffetard, “that wonderful narrow crowded market street” – in those few words he conjures up an instantly recognisable image – as relevant today as it was almost a century ago.

Dotted throughout are references to places that Hemingway visited in Paris, addresses of cafés, bars, and hotels. He can be quite waspish, hitting hard with his observations, personal comments litter the book so that you feel as if he’s sharing his innermost thoughts with the reader. Hemingway spills the beans on who said what, what they were like and whether he liked them or not. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) was a personal friend Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce – writers, artists, patrons of the arts, the glitzy, glamorous grandees of the day who flocked to the dazzling French capital looking for inspiration, for excitement and for pleasure.

His circle of friends was largely the great and the good of the day from America. I found him a little bit pompous, very sure of himself and his skills and utterly delicious to read. In real life he had no such money problems but it certainly adds something to the story when you’re reading it. Reading the book you’d think he was a poverty-stricken young writer, worried about where his next meal will come from.

He was born into a wealthy family and lived a charmed life. He doesn’t write great swathes of descriptions, in fact his depictions are quite sparse but so well-written that you know exactly what he means and don’t need huge tomes to convey an image. Hemingway has a wonderful style, he’s able to convey what he hears and sees to give the reader a real flavour, a feel of the place he is writing about – in this case, Paris in the 1920s. It’s a slim volume, I read it in just a couple of days and it’s one of those un-put-down-able books that has to be read more than once to fully appreciate all of the nuances and little details. A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway about his early years in Paris.

A moveable feast hemingway