PositiveThe Literary Review (UK)Hazareesingh is a fervent admirer and there is more than a touch of hagiography in this eminently scholarly biography. His fairly consistent assumption throughout is that his hero had always been the admirable model of revolutionary rectitude that the more solid documentary evidence of his later activities gives us. Toussaint was certainly a man of presence and organisational ability, but the available sources suggest that he only emerged clearly as a leader in 1793, when what had formerly been the richest colony in the world had already experienced several years of increasing chaos.
Julian Barnes
PositiveTimes Literary SupplementAt one level, The Man in the Red Coat is one long, meandering essay in Montaigne mode. It slides effortlessly from one half-connected topic to another, offers parenthetical thoughts on affairs of our own day or life in general, and time and again wonders what we really know ... But this is more than a biography of Pozzi ... Barnes is sure that in such a showy age, as in our own, there was no such thing as bad publicity.
