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“... in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did not necessarily pass ...”

“... Bunyan’s passionate plea for a simple nonconformist Christianity. The God-Fearer, like most of Dan Jacobson’s recent work, asks to be considered on both literal and symbolic levels. Kobus the Bookbinder, an old man living alone, his existence ‘not much more than a kind of postscript to a life that was already concluded’, is visited by two ...”

“... he might be either, as well as being an anonymous little boy. And that is an image of the way Dan Jacobson has constructed his story – his story being Her Story. It makes a remarkable novel, of a most unusual kind. It shows the unexpectedness and versatility of Jacobson’s powers as a novelist, but also, and ...”

“... on guilt and misery, she was being literal as well as figurative. A pen was what she wrote with. Dan Jacobson’s and Michael Frayn’s reliance on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however ...”

“... agree that it is fiction, but when we ask what they mean, we receive radically different answers. Jacobson, the novelist, is curiously the least literary in his treatment. To him, the Bible is its doctrine, and its doctrine is election, with the concomitant Deuteronomic view of the cyclic nature of history, which he documents with extensive quotations from ...”

“... to your arguments and then, once convinced, would let the matter go. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told Dan Jacobson during a session with the manuscript of a novel, ‘my ego’s not involved.’ He had not been to university, and spent a good deal of time catching up on subjects and authors he thought he should know about: Tinbergen, Winnicott, Hannah ...”

“... societies. (There is a soul-destroying description of London in 1950 by the South African writer Dan Jacobson.) This is the story of a society and an era almost immeasurably different from our own. Kynaston is an enormously productive historian. He has written on the working class, on cricket and, above all, on the City of London. His range of interests ...”

“... of the house Ananda goes to see his tutor, Nestor Davidson, an affectionate portrait of the late Dan Jacobson, who taught Chaudhuri at UCL. ‘It became evident very early that Mr Davidson and Ananda found the same kinds of thing funny.’ They talk about Ananda’s poems. ‘I enjoyed them,’ Davidson says. ‘Not so good,’ Ananda thinks. ‘The ...”

“... town, incidentally, of another of South Africa’s finest 20th-century writers, the novelist Dan Jacobson. Prince’s delicate health and precocious interest in French Symbolist poetry, in particular the work of Mallarmé, Verlaine and Valéry, set him apart from his fellow pupils at Kimberley’s Christian Brothers College. In his late teens a ...”

“... eye, on the 46 bus.The homesick and untethered South African exiles in North London – among them Dan Jacobson – gathered to meet the chic and tiny Nadine Gordimer, just in from Johannesburg, and to sample the trays of vol-au-vents and finger-friendly desserts, iced fancies and decorated chocs. Iris Murdoch, white-faced, bluff, confident, sometimes ...”

“... scenes of hardship and atrocity. Babel’s art is imaginative, figurative. It has been said, by Dan Jacobson, that he ‘aestheticises’ his response to violence. This tendency has no counterpart in Levi, and it may be doubtful whether it could live with the subject-matter of the camps. Babel’s bad times could be turned into art – an art which has ...”

“... claimed to be ill. ‘I’m going to be the youngest person ever to die,’ he’d once said to Dan Jacobson when he wasn’t feeling well. He was then around thirty. Almost three decades later, he was still talking in a similar vein. Even feeling especially healthy could be a bad sign. ‘I’m feeling unusually well at the moment,’ he once told ...”