<b>What a deliciously intelligent entertainment this is, couched in a prose of enviable suppleness</b>…<b> a master is at work here.</b>
- Rupert Christiansen, Daily Telegraph
<b>One of his best books</b>, very handsomely published too…<b> </b>[<i>The Man in the Red Coat</i> is] <b>a bravura performance, highly entertaining</b>.
- David Sexton, Evening Standard, Book of the Week
Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s <i>The Man in the Red Coat </i>— and believe me, it’s <b>teeming with delights</b> — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way… <b>punctuated by the sound of gunshot</b>…<b>[this is a] brilliant, defiantly unconventional book</b>.
- Adam Begley, Spectator
<b>The Belle Époque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed </b><b>with top fin-de-siècle tittle-tattle</b>.
- Robbie Millen and James Marriott, The Times *The Best Books of 2019*
<b>Julian Barnes’s wonderful <i>The Man in the Red Coat </i></b>surges round Belle Epoque Paris… a story full of digressions, white peacocks, missing limbs, amusing adverbs and fantastic clothes. <b>An absolute tonic for grey winter days</b>.
- Claire Harman, Evening Standard *Books of the Year*
<b>Fascinating </b>history, biography and philosophy rolled into one. In <i>The Man in the Red Coat</i>, <b>Barnes is the ideal guide to</b>…<b>a delightful amble through La Belle Epoque</b>… <b>a riveting dissection of an era</b>.
- Martin Chilton, Independent
This <b>elegant, seductive history </b>is a book best read in the spirit of its times. <i>The Man In The Red Coat </i>is less a lesson than a day-dream of France’s golden heyday. <b>Wrap yourself in a Japanese tea gown, languish on a peacock-print sofa and abandon yourself to fin-de-siècle Paris and the ministrations of Doctor Love.</b>
- Laura Freeman, Mail on Sunday
As with his masterpiece, <i>A History of the World in 10½ Chapters</i> (1989), [Barnes’] new book [<i>The Man in the Red Coat</i>] seems <b>different from anything ever written before</b>.
- John Carey, Sunday Times
This lavish study of society surgeon Samuel de Pozzi invites us into a world of artists, libertines and medical innovation… [it’s]<b> enjoyably obsessive</b>...<b>biographical detective work.</b>
- Tim Adams, Observer, Book of the Week
<b>Belle-Epoque Paris comes alive</b> in this biography of a pioneering French doctor, Samuel Jean Pozzi... Barnes, the author of <i>The Sense of an Ending</i>, sketches his subject's life <b>in fascinating detail</b>, including entanglements with Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt.
- Joumana Khatib, New York Times
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2020*
'A bravura performance, highly entertaining' Evening Standard
The 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, 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 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, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2019**