The Man in the Red Coat
JULIAN BARNES
(JONATHAN CAPE, 280 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 020 7799 4064

In the summer of 1885 a trinity of French intellectuals embarked on a shopping visit to London. Two of them, Count Robert de Montesquiou and Prince Edmond de Polignac, were well-known in Parisian artistic and literary circles; the third was a fashionable surgeon and distinguished pioneer of gynaecology, Samuel Pozzi, an Anglophile with a love of tweeds and Liberty curtains, and a man who was evidently irresistible to numerous society women. He is best remembered today as the subject of John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of him in a full-length red coat, “Dr Pozzi at Home”.

Julian Barnes, in his first work of non-fiction since his 2015 collection of essays on art, Keeping an Eye Open, has chosen to focus on the glamorous, if complicated, social life of Dr Pozzi as the central figure in this richly illustrated, witty and detailed tour d’horizon of the belle époque period. Pozzi was a cosmopolitan figure of rare good taste and for Barnes, first drawn to him by chance through Sargent’s portrait, he plays a compensatory, even heroic role at a time not dissimilar to our own period of political turmoil, when what Barnes describes as Britain’s “deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union” appears imminent.