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The best Penguin Podcast episodes for aspiring writers

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Where to start reading Julian Barnes

There are many books that depict the permutations of growing older

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The best books that celebrate old age

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7 riveting novels on battles for power

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Interviews

The Vintage Podcast special: Julian Barnes and Suzanne Dean

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and five works of non-fiction, including Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Légion d'honneur in 2017.

History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. 
 
From the Titanic to the Amazon, the raft of the Medusa to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is no ordinary history, but something stranger: a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. 
 
'Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising, and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss’ Nadime Gordimer

Flaubert's Parrot

Barnes manages to be erudite but extremely funny too… You never know what Barnes is going to do next and I admire that.’

Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in

A gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!

Endless food for thought, beautifully written... A tour de force

A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny

Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in!

Julian Barnes' wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks Flaubert made on a forgetting world. The writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny, and among the best prose I have read in years

A delight... Handsomely the best novel published in England in 1984

A dazzling achievement...remarkably inventive as well as audacious

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. 
 
As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself. 
 
A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour-de-force of seductive originality. 
 
‘Unputdownable... A mesmeric original’ Philip Larkin 
 
‘Delightful and enriching...a book to revel in!’ Joseph Heller 
 
‘A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny’ Sunday Times 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR TO MARK THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PUBLICATION

Elizabeth Finch

[Barnes] is always clever, often original and unusually funny... Elizabeth Finch...offers plenty to chew on...with barely a sentence in it that doesn't have some nutritional value.

Everything Barnes writes changes everything... Barnes's latest novel, must be read at least twice for the full force of its voltage to be felt... A cryptic crossword of a novel, Elizabeth Finch is a tricksier and even brainier version of Flaubert's Parrot.

The book's central and most enthralling section...deals with a figure EF esteemed as a kindred spirit: Julian the Apostate... A bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition... [Elizabeth Finch] also celebrates the cast of mind Barnes most prizes. A connoisseur and master of irony himself, he fills this book with instances of its exhilarating power.

Elizabeth Finch ranks alongside Barnes' best.

A new novel from Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes is always a literary event, and Elizabeth Finch...is not different. Wistful, thought-provoking stuff.

This is...Julian Barnes...in his best ambitious high concept mode, serious and playful at once.

A surprisingly compelling novel... a thought-provoking book that plays with the relationship between author and reader.

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 in the Red Coat

Britain’s most passionate Francophile takes us on a wonderfully rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi

What a deliciously intelligent entertainment this is, couched in a prose of enviable suppleness… a master is at work here.

One of his best books, very handsomely published too… [The Man in the Red Coat is] a bravura performance, highly entertaining.

Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way… punctuated by the sound of gunshot…[this is a] brilliant, defiantly unconventional book.

The Belle Époque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed with top fin-de-siècle tittle-tattle.

Julian Barnes’s wonderful The Man in the Red Coat surges round Belle Epoque Paris… a story full of digressions, white peacocks, missing limbs, amusing adverbs and fantastic clothes. An absolute tonic for grey winter days.

Fascinating history, biography and philosophy rolled into one. In The Man in the Red Coat, Barnes is the ideal guide to…a delightful amble through La Belle Epoque… a riveting dissection of an era.

This elegant, seductive history is a book best read in the spirit of its times. The Man In The Red Coat is less a lesson than a day-dream of France’s golden heyday. Wrap yourself in a Japanese tea gown, languish on a peacock-print sofa and abandon yourself to fin-de-siècle Paris and the ministrations of Doctor Love.

As with his masterpiece, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), [Barnes’] new book [The Man in the Red Coat] seems different from anything ever written before.

This lavish study of society surgeon Samuel de Pozzi invites us into a world of artists, libertines and medical innovation… [it’s] enjoyably obsessive...biographical detective work.

Belle-Epoque Paris comes alive in this biography of a pioneering French doctor, Samuel Jean Pozzi... Barnes, the author of The Sense of an Ending, sketches his subject's life in fascinating detail, including entanglements with Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt.

Witty, gossipy and erudite, Julian Barnes brilliantly tells the story of an era through the eyes of a man who knew the writers, thinkers, aristocrats and actors of the day.

Marvellously rich and thought-provoking.

I was enchanted by Julian Barnes’s splendid tour d’horizon of belle époque society, of its art and literature. His book (The Man in the Red Coat) brought back memories of authors read long ago and and opened up promises of paths yet to be explored.

Barnes is an urbane and cultured guide, weaving his commentary on art, literature and philosophy into a fluid narrative while exposing the seams of a society preoccupied with reputation to a deadly degree… This is the story of an era so dizzying and fantastical that it seems like fiction, even in Barnes’ impeccably researched retelling.

[In] this beguiling hybrid of a book…[Barnes] knit[s] his patchwork of stories together with all the suturing skill of Dr Pozzi, that fast-fingered virtuoso of the catgut or silver-wire stitch… [A] richly textured portrait of Pozzi and his friends.

Barnes shapes...rich material into a compelling tale of collaborations, innovation and excess.

[Barnes] liberates us from the shallowness of our absorption in the present, and reminds us that we always know less than we think about what we’re doing.

Barnes is as freewheeling in his painting of a hedonistic period as Pozzi was free-thinking - and presents it as a mirror to our own "hysterical" age.

[The Man in the Red Coat is] top international tittle-tattle… sparkling and very enjoyable.

[A] richly illustrated, witty and detailed tour d’horizon of the belle époque period… Julian Barnes conveys all the joie de vivre and the decadence of the period as well as the rich array of intellectual and artistic life shared between France and Britain… a book that should fascinate many a Francophile.

A masterful portrayal of the Belle Epoque.

A personal meditation on the belle époque… The Man in the Red Coat is one long, meandering essay in Montaigne mode.

The book is at once a biography of Pozzi in the context of his time and a picture of the time as refracted by Pozzi. Barnes constructs it as a kind of mosaic.

I’ve just started Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat, and I am already hooked.

A tour de force… Dr Pozzi may not be remembered in medical history but his legacy is an artwork of himself in his prime that has transcended time.

Steeped in the luxury and scandal of Belle Epoque Paris and London, Barnes resurrects the charming, philandering Pozzi.

Royal Academy Magazine *10 novels about art you won't put down*

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2020* 
 
'A bravura performance, highly entertaining' Evening Standard 
 
The 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 Pozzi. 
 
In 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, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker - a scientific man with a famously complicated private life. 
 
Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2019**

Essays on Art (Updated Edition)

Keeping an Eye Open

An updated edition of the highly acclaimed collection of writing on art by one of Britain’s best-loved authors, with seven new illustrated essays.

[A] beautifully produced and judiciously illustrated collection.

The essay on Lucian Freud...is completely brilliant. I feel uplifted by it... It is a wonderful book.

I became entirely mesmerised by Barnes’ prose… Keeping an Eye Open is a rich and thoughtful book that should not be rushed. These essays are too full of chiaroscuro, their flashes of illumination too fascinating, their connections too interesting for a cursory reading.

It’s a readable, riveting, informed work with sharp, marvelous anecdotes and observations. In this beautifully illustrated book you’re in great company. Barnes is a sane and steady guide… Wonderful stuff.

Extremely rewarding, informative, attentive, thoughtful, entertaining essays.

This is an erudite, entertaining and highly personal collection of essays from the Booker Prize-winning novelist.

For their insights all these essays are worth reading.

Barnes’s essays abound in verbal images that are pictorially vivid.

This magnificent survey draws its strength from its intensely personal focus, each piece reverberating off others despite the long span of their composition. It’s a stream of thinking, over years, rather than a set of disparate essays… [A] fascinating and brilliant book.

The pieces show Barnes to be a sympathetic and enthusiastic critic, with a tremendous ability to convey the visceral impact of a painting.

A brilliant collection of essays by the novelist.

[An] always entertaining and enlightening collection.

If only all art writing were as good as this.

Barnes weaves biography, history, philosophy [together] in this fascinating, richly illuminating and beautifully written book.

Hard not to see this being my book of the year.

There’s no hint of pretentiousness here, so why not revel in Barnes’ wit and arch insight.

In Keeping an Eye Open [Barnes] proves to be a thoughtful observer of art, and a keen student of its history.

[Barnes] is bold, acerbic and free from phony reverence. He is also genuinely fascinated by visual art in itself and not as a prompt for flights of prosodic fancy. The pieces are replete with unashamed pleasure in looking and teasing out connections.

Fully illustrated in colour throughout, this is a fascinating and insightful look into the world of art from Romanticism to Realism.

The essays are not just novel in form but clear and even elegantly written.

Combining what is clearly a life-long love of art with an admirable depth of knowledge, Barnes brings a novelist’s eye to the gallery wall and, with this, a fresh, accessible approach to the stories being told in each painting.

Thought-provoking, beautifully presented, tender.

Barnes has a wonderful eye for what makes a good picture, and a command of language that again and again allows readers to share what he sees.

Well-informed and deeply admiring, but never didactic.

[It] gave me a new confidence in how to engage with, understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.

For those…insecure when viewing art, not always sure how to decode it or emotionally engage with it, this offers a lifeline…Utterly compelling.

A typically elegant ad absorbing book by one of t great contemporary English Writers, and with strong Gallic undertones – a wonderful set of essays about artists, many of them French, covering the period from Romanticism through to modernism.

Opinionated, enthusiastic, witty and beautifully written.

Julian Barnes is best known for his fiction...but he's also an excellent art writer... Peppered with personal insights and select historical detail, each piece is as engaging as the next

The updated edition of Julian Barnes’ best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays 
 
‘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 we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue... It is a rare picture which 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.’ 
 
Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism. 
 
Fully illustrated in colour throughout, Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes’ essays on Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Morisot, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Cassatt, Redon, Van Gogh, the legendary critic Huysmans, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud. It also offers new perspectives on the fruitful relationship between writers and artists, and on the rivalry among Russian collectors of French art in the late 19th century. 
 
‘A typically elegant and absorbing book by one of the greatest contemporary English writers.’ Guardian *Books of the Year* 
‘Gave me a new confidence in how to understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.’ Mariella Frostrup 
‘My book of the year.’ Natalie Haynes, Independent

The Pedant in the Kitchen

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. 
 
It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant's true pedantry emerges. How big, exactly, is a 'lump'? Is a 'slug' larger than a 'gout'? When does a 'drizzle' become a downpour? And what is the difference between slicing and chopping?This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton's Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss. 
 
© Julian Barnes 2003 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. 
 
It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant's true pedantry emerges. How big, exactly, is a 'lump'? Is a 'slug' larger than a 'gout'? When does a 'drizzle' become a downpour? And what is the difference between slicing and chopping?This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton's Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss.

Julian Barnes

It is a monumental novel capturing the struggle of art and the artist under the hand of totalitarianism.

We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. 
 
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, Tony Webster and Adrian Finn swore to stay friends for life. Now in middle age, a lawyer’s letter proves that Tony’s memory may be imperfect. The story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past, The Sense of an Ending is laced with Julian Barnes’ trademark precision, dexterity and insight, and won him the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011. 
 
‘A precise, poignant portrait of the costs and benefits of time passing, of friendship, of love. A small masterpiece’ Erica Wagner, The Times

Julian Barnes

Praise for The Sense of an Ending

Intriguing and engaging.

It is a monumental novel capturing the struggle of art and the artist under the hand of totalitarianism.

Books by Julian Barnes

Articles featuring Julian Barnes

9 Vintage Paperback Novels to Add to Your Summer TBR Pile

The best Penguin Podcast episodes for aspiring writers

Where to start reading Julian Barnes

The best books that celebrate old age

7 riveting novels on battles for power

The Vintage Podcast special: Julian Barnes and Suzanne Dean

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