Jean-Jacques Sempé, born in Bordeaux in 1932, lives in Paris. His caricatures in Paris Match, Punch, Marie-Claire and L’Express were merely the first steps towards his pinnacle at the New Yorker, for which he worked from 1978 on. Sempé’s name is inevitably mentioned in conjunction with writers such as René Goscinny, Patrick Modiano and Patrick Süskind. Without him, characters such as Le Petit Nicolas, Catherine Certitude and Mr Sommer would be unthinkable.