The Man in the Red Coat 

by Julian Barnes



The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a

rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering

surgeon Samuel Pozzi





In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’

shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with

an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John

Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society

doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker – a rational and scientific man

with a famously complicated private life.



Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The

beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side:

hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice

and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might

imagine.



The Man in the Red Coat is at once a fresh and original portrait of the Belle

Epoque – its heroes and villains, its writers, artists and thinkers – and a

life of a man ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, the

new book from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange

of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping

that exchange alive.

 
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45170477-the-man-in-the-red-coat

 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Jean_Pozzi