Julian Barnes’s latest book comprises five micro-essays, originally commissioned for a radio series a decade ago and repackaged here. The publisher spies an opportunity, perhaps, for something like a manifesto on open-mindedness, with Barnes’s musings the vehicle. Not unreasonable: as the author of 14 novels, winner of the Booker, he knows a thing or two about the power of language: “I believe deeply in words, in their ability to represent thought, define truth, and create beauty. I’m equally aware that words are constantly used for the opposite purposes: to obfuscate truth, misrepresent thought, lie, slander, and provoke hatred.”

It follows from this recognition that a clever person ought to be able to rethink old convictions in light of new evidence and life experience – to see one’s misperceptions for what they are and change one’s mind. Call it the virtue of the volte-face. But the broadcast conceit doesn’t translate well on the page, leaving the author exposed. In a chapter extolling the benefits of rereading, he tells us that after a lifetime of despising EM Forster’s prissiness, he eventually came around to him. Belatedly, a subversive and “delightfully unpatriotic” writer was discovered. Forster was funny to boot. Barnes quotes a line from Where Angels Fear to Tread as evidence: “‘Everyone to his taste!’ said Harriet, who always delivered a platitude as if it was an epigram.” But he opens himself up to the same charge with phrases such as: “what a grown-up novelist Forster is”. Or again: “The pleasure of being proved wrong can be a genuine pleasure.”

He has likewise changed his mind about memory. Time was when he thought it “operated like a left-luggage office”, open at all hours for instant recall. These days he distrusts its vagaries, its subtle emendations and self-serving elisions. “Unsubstantiated, uncorroborated memory,” he says, is no better than “an act of the imagination”. But how far has Barnes really shifted on this one? He has evidently distrusted the vagaries of memory for a while now, as anyone familiar with his 1991 novel Talking it Over or the conclusion of The Sense of an Ending will know.Then we have his conversion from “conservative prescriptivist” to “liberal descriptivist”. Here, he pillories the pedants, though he was one himself before working on the Oxford English Dictionary in the 60s, for insisting on pointless distinctions such as the one between “uninterested” (not interested) and “disinterested” (impartial). Some etymological digging reveals that on first usage their senses were reversed. Now he embraces the porosity of language, its boundless adaptability and malleability. Not exactly an heretical opinion, you might think, but for Barnes, who sets great store by his Francophilia, it must have had the thrill of iconoclasm to write this sentence down: “at least we are not French”. There’s no Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Académie Française, tut-tutting at loanwords and shoving ludicrous neologisms down people’s throats.

On the theme of politics, Barnes seems to be on the defensive. He may have voted for six different parties over the course of his life, he half-jokingly tells us, but his positions have remained more or less constant; it’s Britain that has changed: “by staying still, someone of my political beliefs has found himself moving further to the left as the centre moved away from him”. I don’t think this is quite right. Plenty of social attitudes in Britain – on migration, abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex and so on – have if anything moved leftward in the preceding half century.

What’s more, Barnes’s own voting record gives the lie to any notion of unchanging centrism. His support for the Conservatives in 1974 was evidently a vote against the miners. Latterly he declares himself a Corbynista. Nationalisation, disarmament and Lords reform are there among other desiderata in “Barnes’s Benign Republic”. His fiction, too, points to a change in political outlook. Metroland, his debut, published in 1980, was the work of a consummate Little Englander, rejecting the unruly soixante-huitards across the Channel for the mundanity and stability of the home counties. Fast-forward to 2018, and you have The Only Story, the anti-Metroland as it were – a mid-century, May-December romance that sends up the stifling promise of middle England: “suburbia with a tennis wife and 2.4 children”.

Ultimately it is not just these niggles of inconsistency, but the sense of writing forced to fit a frame that is altogether too neat that left me cold. Who knows, though – a future reread might do the trick. Perhaps when I reach his age, in half a century, I’ll have changed my mind too.