Paris ranked one of world’s top 20 cities to live in

Paris is the only French city on the 140-strong “global liveability index” - drawn up by the British economy magazine and released this week - jumping up 13 places this year to reach the top 20 for the first time.

This makes it the most improved city on the list, along with Manchester in England - which rose itself from number 48 last year to number 35 on the 2018 ranking.

The magazine described Paris and Manchester as “resilient” in the face of threats.

It read: “Although both cities have been subjected to large-scale terrorist attacks in recent years, which have undermined security and resulted in heavy security measures, both have shown resilience in the face of adversity."

Yet, Paris was also seen - along with London (number 48) and New York (number 57) - to be somewhat of a “victim of its own success”, as a financial hub city with many people, higher risk of terror, and sometimes-struggling infrastructure.

Vienna in Austria topped the list with an almost-perfect score of 99.1 out of 100, knocking the Australian city of Melbourne off the top spot for the first time in seven years.

Three Canadian cities (Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto), three Australian (Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide), and two Japanese (Osaka and Tokyo) round off the top 10, with Copenhagen in Denmark at number nine.

The list is compiled by the magazine’s “Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)” research team, and considers many criteria, including economic and political stability, housing affordability, criminality, terrorism risk, culture, environment, education, and infrastructure such as public transport.

Unsurprisingly, war-torn and poverty-stricken cities appear at the bottom of the list, including Karachi in Pakistan; Lagos in Nigeria; and Dhakar in Bangladesh. This year, Damascus in Syria appears at the very bottom at number 140.