I first spotted Julian Barnes at a distance, gazing up at a 30-foot tall couple wrapped in an embrace. We’d both arrived some 10 minutes early for our meeting at St Pancras station in central London. He did not look impressed, wrinkling his long nose as he tipped his head all the way back to get a proper look at the statue, titled, appropriately enough, “The Meeting Place”, which looms over the Eurostar platforms.
“You feel bad for looking up her skirt,” he said as he put down a copy of The New Yorker and The Guardian with a half-completed cryptic crossword on our table on a sort of terrace belonging to the station’s branch of Carluccio’s, next to the trains. It was 11.30am, neither breakfast nor lunchtime, and we were neither properly inside nor outside, sitting there in an urban hinterland between England and continental Europe. We ordered a cappuccino and a pastry each, to befit this awkward inter-meal hour, a pain au chocolat for him and a plain croissant for me. “Do you want jam with it?” he, and not the waiter, asked me as I ordered. I did. “Don’t ask for jam, you don’t get it,” he said.
St Pancras was his choice of location. I asked him why we were here. He gave a grin that creased his whole face. “You tell me, you invited me.” When I clarified that I meant the station, rather than the interview, he laughed long and loud at his error. “I thought, that could be a metaphysical question, or a very, very local one.” He likes it here, to put it simply. “It always cheers me up. Same thing with airports, I enjoy them, whether I’m going somewhere, coming back or actually just being there, meeting someone off of a plane. I love that. I love the simple things, like going into the short-term parking.” He laughed again, as indeed he often does.
It is also that at this particular location in London, we are only two hours away from France. Barnes has written extensively on his long love affair with our closest neighbours, first kindled by having two French teachers for parents, and later by studying it at university and visiting the country throughout his life. He’s been travelling on the Eurostar since it opened in 1994. “It’s slightly less glamorous now,” he admits. “I used to be a smoker in those days, and one of my favourite moments would be coming back from Paris, getting on the train. They’d give you dinner, and then you went to the smoking car, and you took your coffee as the train went into the tunnel, and you were underneath the Channel, having your coffee and smoking a cigarette. Simple but exciting.” He doesn’t smoke any more, after a recent bout of pneumonia put him off permanently. “I suppose that’s a good result, but I’ve probably done myself some damage over the last 50 years.”
Barnes, now 79 years old, has enjoyed a glittering career that shows no signs of slowing down. He is the author of two memoirs, one non-fiction book, several essay and short story collections and 14 novels (or 18, inclusive of his crime fiction under the nom de plume Dan Kavanagh), one of which, The Sense of an Ending, won the Booker Prize in 2011, and three more of which have been nominated, including Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984. His latest work, a collection of essays about revising his views on subjects like books, politics and memory called Changing My Mind, was recently published by Notting Hill Editions. He is one of our great public intellectuals, truly worthy of the name, but he wears it lightly enough. Or rather, he seems just as interested in the large philosophical preoccupations of life as he is in the mundane.
St Pancras station offers particularly good people-watching, and Barnes took full advantage of it as we spoke. He’s got a sharp eye for what he refers to in the new essay collection as “the scruffy, everyday details of life”. As we were discussing the disappointments of didactic art, his attention was drawn by a man and a woman who were looking up at the statue. “Oh, he’s enjoying it. She’s not. He’s the optimist. And he’s carrying both the bags,” he said, a look of quiet delight on his face at being able to observe these people in an unguarded moment. “Yes, we’ve just spotted a marriage.”
I asked him about whether people ever set out to have their minds changed. He thought for a few moments, his fingers laced together above his coffee. “Well, sometimes people want to have their minds filled by someone else. I think they are sort of half formed, and then they meet someone who seems to understand the world better, and they take on that understanding of the world. I think perhaps it’s not exactly changing one’s mind as much as being given a mind,” he said. For himself, as he writes in Changing My Mind, some topics he has altered his opinions about over the years are the books of EM Forster and linguistic prescriptivism. “But there are lots of things I haven’t changed my mind about,” he told me. In the book, he lists some of these as the primacy of love, the primacy of art, and that there is great joy, “plus even a certain amount of moral value”, to be found in sport.
Beyond the particulars of what one does and does not change one’s mind about, over the course of a lifetime, the notion of mind changing runs deeper, for Barnes. It asks the question: how much of someone’s essential personhood is made up of their opinions? “Given what we know of the brain, given that we know there’s no ‘self stuff there’, should we say my mind changed me as much as I changed my mind?” he asked. These are impossible questions, but he enjoys them anyway. “It’s hard to think about the brain, because we can only think about the brain using the brain. So we may never come to any correct conclusions, unless AI can look at our brains in a different way.”
If a person’s self is not made up of their opinions, they might be said to be made up of their memories. But memory, as Barnes put it in our conversation and explores in several of his works, is “misleading”. “We adjust it without noticing. I think that’s an advantage to a writer, because people tell their life stories differently, there are ambiguities.” His own memories, in an unvarnished form, don’t strike him as a subject for literary work, however. Barnes is not one for autofiction, as a writer or as a reader. He thought The Years by Annie Ernaux was “terrific, but I sort of thought, ‘Do I want to read any more Annie Ernaux? I get the picture.’”
Barnes is still clearly enamoured with his own early memories about travelling to France, though, particularly his first trip abroad, aged 11 or 12, in his family’s Morris Minor over the Channel on the ferry. “When I First Went to France,” he began in a knowingly nostalgic tone, “we drove down to Newhaven, and they drove the car into a little sort of wooden platter, and they hoisted it into the ship on a crane.” Barnes lifted a hand, moved it a few inches to the side, and then dropped it again, “and they put it down”. He hasn’t changed his mind about the country. He loved it then, and he loves it still. It’s “an irreducible feeling”.
“My take on things, and probably my take on Britain – if I had a different second country, it might have been different. If my parents had been Italian teachers, I would have had a totally different experience. I would have written Dante’s Gerbil. This isn’t very nice,” he said suddenly, looking down at his plate. Indeed they were not good pastries, bready and tired. When we parted ways, there was still half left on his plate. A man doesn’t spend as much of his life thinking about France as Barnes has to eat a substandard pain au chocolat.
“Changing My Mind” by Julian Barnes is published by Notting Hill Editions
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
