It is hard to change our minds, notes Julian Barnes, who has changed his on several occasions. After a lifetime of thinking Georges Simenon and E M Forster overrated as novelists, he now admires them. Simenon, he thinks, was worthy of a Nobel Prize. It is in part a gender issue: Barnes learned as a child that ‘changing her mind is a woman’s privilege’, the assumption being that staying loyal your entire life to a point of view is a mark not of arrogance but masculine integrity, while altering our perspectives suggests not openness but flightiness. ‘When the facts change, I change my mind’, John Maynard Keynes apparently said, but politicians are rarely so persuaded by the other side’s facts that they cross the floor of the House of Commons, and we have yet to hear, as Barnes points out, an episode of Any Questions in which one panel member, having listened carefully to the arguments of another, has a road-to-Damascus experience. How many Brexit voters, observing that the NHS has not received the £350 million per week promised by Boris Johnson, have held up their hands and proclaimed ‘mea culpa’?

‘Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction’, suggested the Dadaist Francis Picabia. Whether they change direction in a flash (like when we fall in love) or as slowly as a truck turning in a muddy lane, when we do swivel 180 degrees, Barnes observes, we assume we have achieved a more elevated rather than a reduced understanding of things.

Changing My Mind is a series of conversion, and non-conversion, narratives. There are short, discursive chapters on memory, words, politics, books, age and time. Barnes – now aged seventy-nine – has never changed his mind on the Big Questions, such as God (he is an atheist), the afterlife (there is