The Man in the Red Coat

Barnes has written wonderful historical fiction; this lovely book is nonfiction, but it's written with a novelist's wandering eye. On the face of it a biography—of the celebrity physician Samuel Pozzi, the subject of the Sargent painting adapted for the cover—it's really a portrait of an age, the French Belle Epoque, a world of dandies and duels, of beauty and rage, tied together by images from the Félix Potin trading cards, collectibles found in department-store chocolates celebrating the 500 most famous figures of the time. Barnes is a graceful and thoughtful inquisitor, but the best part of the book is Pozzi himself, once-famous, now-forgotten, a charismatic, brilliant, innovative, and flawed figure who is a delight to have unearthed from history.