Fascinating

A jam-packed book about our favourite teatime nibble

An incredible journey

Fascinating... Collingham has pulled it off again

[A] fascinating book... Collingham is a wonderful researcher, combining academic rigour with an eye for the captivating details that make the world more interesting

Fascinating history, biography and philosophy rolled into one. In The Man in the Red Coat, Barnes is the ideal guide to…a delightful amble through La Belle Epoque… a riveting dissection of an era.

This elegant, seductive history is a book best read in the spirit of its times. The Man In The Red Coat is less a lesson than a day-dream of France’s golden heyday. 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.

As with his masterpiece, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), [Barnes’] new book [The Man in the Red Coat] seems different from anything ever written before.

This lavish study of society surgeon Samuel de Pozzi invites us into a world of artists, libertines and medical innovation… [it’s] enjoyably obsessive...biographical detective work.

Belle-Epoque Paris comes alive in this biography of a pioneering French doctor, Samuel Jean Pozzi... Barnes, the author of The Sense of an Ending, sketches his subject's life in fascinating detail, including entanglements with Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt.

Witty, gossipy and erudite, Julian Barnes brilliantly tells the story of an era through the eyes of a man who knew the writers, thinkers, aristocrats and actors of the day.

Marvellously rich and thought-provoking.

I was enchanted by Julian Barnes’s splendid tour d’horizon of belle époque society, of its art and literature. His book (The Man in the Red Coat) brought back memories of authors read long ago and and opened up promises of paths yet to be explored.

Barnes is an urbane and cultured guide, weaving his commentary on art, literature and philosophy into a fluid narrative while exposing the seams of a society preoccupied with reputation to a deadly degree… This is the story of an era so dizzying and fantastical that it seems like fiction, even in Barnes’ impeccably researched retelling.

[In] this beguiling hybrid of a book…[Barnes] knit[s] his patchwork of stories together with all the suturing skill of Dr Pozzi, that fast-fingered virtuoso of the catgut or silver-wire stitch… [A] richly textured portrait of Pozzi and his friends.

Barnes shapes...rich material into a compelling tale of collaborations, innovation and excess.

[Barnes] liberates us from the shallowness of our absorption in the present, and reminds us that we always know less than we think about what we’re doing.

Barnes is as freewheeling in his painting of a hedonistic period as Pozzi was free-thinking - and presents it as a mirror to our own "hysterical" age.

[The Man in the Red Coat is] top international tittle-tattle… sparkling and very enjoyable.

[A] richly illustrated, witty and detailed tour d’horizon of the belle époque period… Julian Barnes conveys all the joie de vivre and the decadence of the period as well as the rich array of intellectual and artistic life shared between France and Britain… a book that should fascinate many a Francophile.

Timely stuff.

An intricate biographical essay.

[A] richly entertaining study.

A masterful portrayal of the Belle Epoque.

A personal meditation on the belle époque… The Man in the Red Coat is one long, meandering essay in Montaigne mode.

The book is at once a biography of Pozzi in the context of his time and a picture of the time as refracted by Pozzi. Barnes constructs it as a kind of mosaic.

Elegant and resonant.

I’ve just started Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat, and I am already hooked.

A tour de force… Dr Pozzi may not be remembered in medical history but his legacy is an artwork of himself in his prime that has transcended time.

Steeped in the luxury and scandal of Belle Epoque Paris and London, Barnes resurrects the charming, philandering Pozzi.

One of the most talked about books of this year . . . compelling and significant.

Channon's jaw-dropping account, lovingly curated by the historian and former Mail writer Simon Heffer, is compelling.

Delicious, dangerous and utterly compulsive.

Dripping with bons mots, anecdote and scandal, [these] are addictive, even if they elicit repulsion as well as delight.

A momentous publishing event. Candid, unabashed, vivid and manifold. They will be prized for their powerful evocation of social milieux . . . Heffer's footnotes are always informative, just and accurate, often amusing, and can seldom be faulted.

An unadulterated masterpiece . . . A larder of quotable treats.

Scintillating wit, memorable descriptions and compelling gossip. Heffer has done a magnificent job. Riveting.

Whatever you think of him Channon ranks among the great diarists. He is at turns brilliant, witty, trivial and spiteful, with observations about some figures whose names have stood the test of time. Simon Heffer has done an excellent job as editor and his copious footnotes are often as entertaining as the diaries.

An inspired diarist. After devouring this volume readers will be salivating for the next.