This novel revolves around Charlie Mason, a young Englishman whose father sends him to Paris to have some fun over the Christmas holidays. There, he meets his childhood friend Simon, who introduces him to Lydia, a Russian woman whose husband has been sent to prison in Guyana. Charlie is an innocent and rather sheltered young man, and through his two friends, he encounters a world of political ideas, passion and hardship that he had never even considered. He eventually returns home, happy to find his quiet family life again, but with his eyes opened a little wider to the complexities of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe won\u2019t bother about the Poussins to-day,\u201d she said. \u201cYou have to come to the Louvre to see them, and there\u2019s no doubt that he was a Great Artist. But he was more of a painter\u2019s painter than a layman\u2019s, and I think you\u2019re a little young to appreciate him. One day when you\u2019re both of you a bit older we\u2019ll come and have a good go at him. I mean you have to be rather sophisticated to thoroughly understand him. The room that we\u2019re coming to now is nineteenth century. But I don\u2019t think we need bother about Delacroix either. He was a painter\u2019s painter too, and I wouldn\u2019t expect you to see in him what I do; you must take my word for it that he was a very considerable artist. He was no mean colourist and he had a strong romantic feeling. And you certainly needn\u2019t trouble your heads with the Barbizon School. In my young days they were very much admired, but that was before we understood the Impressionists even, and of course we hadn\u2019t so much as heard of C\u00e9zanne or Matisse; they don\u2019t amount to anything and they can be safely ignored. I want you to look first at the Odalisque of Ingres and then at the Olympia of Manet. They\u2019re wonderfully placed, opposite one another, so that you can look at both of them at the same time, compare them and draw your own conclusions.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This novel revolves around Charlie Mason, a young Englishman whose father sends him to Paris to have some fun over the Christmas holidays. There, he meets his childhood friend Simon, who introduces him to Lydia, a Russian woman whose husband has been sent to prison in Guyana. Charlie is an innocent and rather sheltered young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[291,296],"tags":[31,98,119],"class_list":["post-22326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-2026","category-year-of-reading-2026","tag-family","tag-life","tag-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/maximus-mazar-JK4icIgvxwE-unsplash-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22328,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22326\/revisions\/22328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}