Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes is one of the brightest and most original prose writers of modern Britain, the author of such international bestsellers as One Story, The Sound of Time, The Sense of the End, Arthur and George, A History of the World 10½ chapters”, “Flaubert’s Parrot” and many others. Perhaps his main talent is the ability to easily and naturally play styles and directions. Subtle stylization and caustic irony, refined lyricism and sarcasm almost reaching the point of cynicism, aggressive toughness and cheerful mischief - Barnes is capable of all this and much more. “Which genre should “Portrait of a Man in Red” be classified into - historical, biographical or philosophical? » – asked the Independent newspaper; and she herself answered: “To all three at the same time! Here is the perfect guide to an amazing era.” So, meet Samuel Pozzi - a fashionable Parisian doctor of the late 19th century, the father of modern gynecology and a legendary womanizer; in a word, the same “man in red” depicted in the famous portrait by Sargent “Doctor Pozzi at Home”. Through the lens of the doctor's journey to Albion, equipped with a letter of recommendation from Sargent to Henry James, Barnes examines the Belle Époque in all its diversity, and the reader cannot help but draw alarming parallels with the present day. Moreover, the doctor is not traveling alone: he is accompanied by refined aristocrats Prince de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou - the prototype of Baron de Charlus from Proust’s epic “In Search of Lost Time”. For the first time in Russian!