The Man in the Red Coat

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 had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s most remarkable portraits four years earlier. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, a society doctor, pioneer gynecologist, 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 by Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France. It makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive.