MAN IN THE RED COAT

'The Belle Epoque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed with top fin-de-siècle tittle-tattle.' - The Times, The Best Books of 2019. Handsomely published with colour plates and in heavyweight hardback, we have the US edition of this fine history. In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping - a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. Our guide through the backdrop of Belle Epoque Paris is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, free thinker, and man of science with a famously complicated private life and who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people - Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and James Whistler among others - place and time, we are not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but also one of violence, prejudice and nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side - hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and a time of rampant prejudice and bloodshed. Bourbons and Orleanists, wicked paper editors, salonnieres and famous whores seen through the eyes of the humane gynaecologist and general surgeon Pozzi. Illustrated endpapers, colour and other plates. 270pp, remainder mark.