Exploring the complexities of changing one's mind, Julian Barnes delves into how our perceptions shift regarding politics, literature, and personal memories. He examines the belief that such transformations signify growth and maturity, challenging the notion that change always leads to improvement. Through engaging essays, Barnes invites readers to reflect on the nature of belief and the factors that influence our evolving perspectives on various aspects of life.
The Sunday Times Bestseller from the Winner of the Booker Prize She will change the way you see the world . . . 'I'll remember Elizabeth Finch when most other characters I've met this year have faded' The Times Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration. Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class. Tasked with unpacking her notebooks after her death, Neil encounters once again Elizabeth's astonishing ideas on the past and on how to make sense of the present. But Elizabeth was much more than a scholar. Her secrets are waiting to be revealed . . . and will change Neil's view of the world forever. 'Enthralling . . . A connoisseur and master of irony himself, [Barnes] fills this book with instances of its exhilarating power' Sunday Times 'A lyrical, thoughtful and intriguing exploration of love, grief and the collective myths of history' Booklist
The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel PozziIn the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’ shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits.The three men's lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker, a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life.The Man in the Red Coat is at once a fresh and original portrait of the French Belle Epoque – its heroes and villains, its writers, artists and thinkers – and a life of a man ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, the new book from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive.
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more ; or love the less, and suffer the less ? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn't know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he's proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.
An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending. “An engaging and empathetic volume.” —The New York Times Book Review As Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting … But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.” This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin. The seventeen essays gathered here help trace the arc from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism; they are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.
When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this disarmingly witty book, Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death can be good for our careers and why we eventually turn into our parents. Barnes is the perfect guide to the weirdness of the only thing that binds us all.Selected from the book Nothing to be Frightened Ofby Julian BarnesVINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series-Calmby Tim ParksDrinkingby John CheeverBabiesby Anne EnrightPsychedelics by Aldous Huxley
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"Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10 Chapters presents a surprising and subversive fictional-history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten- they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin... This is no ordinary history, but something stranger; a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist."
