Who doesn't love essays? Well, plenty of you, I suppose, or Vintage wouldn't have slapped this un-optimistic price on the book. But we need them, we really do: their relationship with literature is by no means parasitical. For instance, you might have recently been enjoying the television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. In this volume alone there are three – three! – essays on Ford's work, each of which will, unless you are already an expert, considerably deepen your appreciation and knowledge of this hitherto under-appreciated writer. Ford is famously subtle, a devious master of unreliable narration, which is not something that TV versions, however good, can easily pull off. Still, at least they give the writer exposure, and Barnes, riffing on the famous opening sentence of The Good Soldier ("this is the saddest story I have ever heard"), gives us a masterclass in Ford's technique."The first part of the sentence takes our attention, and rightly so," writes Barnes. "It cannot logically be until the second reading (and it may not be until the third or fourth) that we note the falsity of the final word." He then comes up with a lovely phrase – is it really his own? If so, I would like to shake him by the hand for it – to describe how certain words can alert us to the unreliability of a narration: "It gives a creak under the foot as we put our weight on it."

There's more than just good teaching going on here, though. You get literary gossip, too, straight off the shovel. A couple of pages later on, Barnes describes running into "one of our better-known literary novelists, whose use of indirection and the bumbling narrator seemed to me to derive absolutely from Ford". Barnes asks if Ford was an influence, and is told: "Please pretend I haven't read The Good Soldier." Well, when I read that, I thought I had a pretty good idea who that novelist was, but the next sentence begins "More recently, I was talking to my friend Ian McEwan ..." which rather wrong-footed me (we learn that McEwan gives his two main characters in On Chesil Beach names from The Good Soldier). Then again, this could be a nice little bit of misdirection on Barnes's part – a teasing, Fordian joke on us (and on McEwan). Who knows? It is all part of the fun. And Barnes himself went on to write his own Fordian novel, The Sense of an Ending, a decade and a bit after writing that essay. (We get dates and provenances of the pieces at the end. When collections of essays don't do this, it drives me crazy.)

As for the other essays, they all represent Barnes at his most engaged and, in his way, passionate. No one is going to mistake him, and the genteel silkiness of his style, for Hunter S Thompson, but when he cares about something you know it. Eight of the essays here are, in one way or another, about French matters, and Barnes is someone I will trust, over all other Englishmen, on such stuff (Chamfort, Houellebecq, Ford and Kipling in France, and on translating Madame Bovary, a brilliant piece I vividly remember from when it came out, and is pretty much compulsory reading for those who are interested either in that novel or in the business of translation).

The short story, a tripartite homage to Hemingway (a reworking of "Homage to Switzerland", which you can hear Barnes himself reading in a Guardian books podcast), is an enjoyable five-finger exercise, really, but there is a proper time and place for such exercises, and this book is one such. Dealing as it does with three versions of a novelist-cum-creative-writing-teacher, the story places us somewhat in Posy Simmonds territory – but that's no bad thing.

The final piece, "Regulating Sorrow" (the title is from Dr Johnson), a comparison of how Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates came to deal with bereavement, is, given Barnes's loss of his wife in 2008, almost too painful to read. He quotes Johnson on what it is like to outlive one "whom he has long loved" ("the continuity of being is lacerated"), and needs to make no further comment.

© The Guardian 2013

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