Julian Barnes

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 rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life.
Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian belle époque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side : hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, with rampant prejudice, and more parallels to today than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is at once a portrait of this astonishing era and of a man ahead of his time.