The American Scholar

Glamour and Violence

THE MAN IN THE RED COAT

BY JULIAN BARNES

Knopf, 288 pp., $26.95

HE MAN IN THE red coat on the cover of Julian Barnes’s eponymous biography has neither a name nor a face—a fitting mystery, as Barnes had never heard of him until he happened on his “tremendous” portrait done by John Singer Sargent in 1881. A few pages in, the reader is told that the man clad in this sumptuous red coat was Samuel Pozzi and learns quickly that he was known as a remarkable gynecologist and an indefatigable lover. Sarah Bernhardt, who knew him in both guises, nicknamed him (Doctor God).

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