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“... Like all the older people among my mother’s family connections, M. was an immigrant to South Africa from Eastern Europe. He had arrived in the country as a boy and had grown up in Johannesburg. Unlike virtually every other Jewish immigrant, however, he had chosen to identify himself not with the urban, prosperous, relatively sophisticated English-speaking section of the population, but with the Boers, the Afrikaners ...”

“... Dippy-dippy-dation, my operation: How many stitches did you have? Children’s Counting Song Six weeks after being taken to hospital during a severe attack of pancreatitis, I returned there to have my gall-bladder removed. This is of course a routine surgical procedure (routine for the surgeons, if not for the patients): indeed, a timely newspaper article had informed me that it was ‘the major surgical intervention most commonly carried out in Great Britain ...”

“... It is always difficult to admit to oneself, let alone convey to others, the peculiar combinations of indolence and energy, chance and obsession, which go into the making of any piece of fiction. To say that inattention and vacancy of mind are as important to it as concentration and purposefulness sounds like a mere piece of mystification: but I fear it is the truth ...”

“... There are people, birds and mice, other cats, cars. There are trees, flowerbeds, the lawn, paths, fences. There are rooms, stairs, radiators. It would be untrue to say that I have never known anything else. I can remember a place quite unlike this one. It had no shapes and names; it consisted only of a darkness that squirmed and moved about; it was part of me and I was part of it ...”

“... The recipient of the following letter was Sir James Hayes-Sadler, Governor of the East African Protectorate (soon to become known as the Colony of Kenya). Its author was a British settler writing from Nyeri, in the colony’s newly established ‘white highlands’. The year was 1908.            Dear Sir James Sadler,      A grave matter has occurred here ...”

“... The first piece of verse by Rudyard Kipling I committed to memory – without even knowing I was doing so – was incised in large Roman capitals on a wall of the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley, South Africa. During the Anglo-Boer War, Kimberley was besieged for some months by forces from the two Boer republics, the Transvaal (De Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) and the Orange Free State ...”

“... This is the first part of a two-part interview. Part 2: ‘The Price’.Ian Hamilton died of cancer on 27 December 2001, aged 63. It was a death that the ‘LRB’ has especial cause to lament. He was a great support to this paper, helping to get it going in 1979, serving ever since on its editorial board, and above all contributing many exact, unsparing and funny pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football ...”

“... This is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the distinctions, the reticences and borderlines, you set so much store by in your own verse?Yes ...”

“... thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.’ Dan Jacobson would agree. In his foreword to these 13 austerely beautiful recollections, he commits himself not only to the truth but also to shapeliness, to design, to form, to narratives ‘which would appear to begin naturally, develop in a surprising and ...”

“... explain the puzzle of lives lived, but to seize and transcribe it. In his new book, All for Love, Dan Jacobson captures a story from late 19th-century European history with an anthropologist’s eye for detail. Through his foolish, unself-knowing lovers and the extraordinary, half-absurd drama of their affair, we seem to see the shapes and forms of ...”

“... Dan Jacobson grew up in the diamond town of Kimberley, South Africa. England was one of the places he looked to for inspiration. As it turned out, his interest in English literature and his habit of falling on copies of the New Statesman were ways of sending ahead. From his description of Kimberley on a Saturday afternoon in Time and Time Again (1985), it is obvious why he hankered for another life, the further away the better: Helpless with boredom, stupefied by their own nullity, town and sky yawned at one another ...”

“... ends with a heartfelt declaration of his desire to hold onto Kafka’s artistic legacy. Dan Jacobson alludes adversely to Kundera in an essay (on Sinyavsky) collected in Adult Pleasures, but only in passing. His charge is one of whimsicality, and it may be true that in practice there is more difficulty in combining the novel of play with the ...”

“... Song, Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on ...”

“... fate of those written by him, which, as readers of the obituaries and of his conversations with Dan Jacobson in this paper will recall, cost the late Ian Hamilton much grief when he tried to quote them verbatim in his biography and was taken to court. Salinger wasn’t having any, and you have to wonder whether the old curmudgeon deserves even a ...”

“... Both these books are about recovering and redeeming a past: the past of Dan Jacobson’s grandfather, Heshel Melamed, the rabbi of a community of Jews in the obscure Lithuanian village of Varniai (Vorna it probably would have been to him); Eva Hoffman’s past and the past of Bransk, a Polish shtetl 180 kilometres east of Warsaw, whose history – alternately dismal and cheering – she interpolates into that of Poles and Jews generally, from the Statute of Kalisz to the present ...”