An attractive candidate for the geometric mean of m positive definite matrices A1, . . . , Am is their Riemannian barycentre G. One of its important properties, monotonicity in the m arguments, has been established recently by J. Lawson and Y. Lim. We give a much simpler proof of this result, and prove some other inequalities. One of these says that, for every unitarily invariant norm, |||G||| ...