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“... Howard Jacobson began writing novels late in life. As he tells it, the life was nothing much to write about. He was born in Manchester in 1942. His family was Jewish with a modest upward mobility track leading from Salford to Whitefield via Prestwich. The Jacobsons evidently made it to Prestwich. The young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge ...”

“... James is your vice, then The Remake is not such a bad poison to choose. The same cannot be said of Howard Jacobson. By unhappy chance, he, too, was commissioned by the Times Literary Supplement, at the same time as James: he was to survey Australian fiction, and the performance makes James on Australian poetry look like Dr Johnson on a good day. ...”

“... In Howard Jacobson’s 1998 novel No More Mr Nice Guy, a newspaper columnist, Frank, is approached on the street by a female reader wanting his autograph. She is flustered by her own boldness, and to his mind she has good reason to be: he thinks that asking a strange man for a signature shows no less temerity than asking him for sex ...”

“... Howard Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind, was published last year, and made one think that a new exponent of the comic academic narrative had arrived. Jacobson’s hero, Sefton Goldberg, Jewish and highly suspicious of his Gentile surroundings, is aggressive towards the literature he’s supposed to be teaching, to a degree that makes Leavis seem like a nice auntie ...”

“... hard to read without some pain either Jeanette Winterson’s rewriting of The Winter’s Tale or Howard Jacobson’s of The Merchant of Venice. Part of the problem is that this series seems to operate on the principle that the ideal person to rewrite a given play must be one who shares an obvious feature with it. Winterson is an orphan, so she gets a ...”

“... alarm at some of the abuse directed at ‘obvious’ Jews, like the episode recently recounted by Howard Jacobson when a woman spat on him in the street and then suggested he needed a shower of a particular kind. When you consider the lethal attack on worshippers leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque last year, it may well be that it is Muslims who feel as ...”

“... folds. Following a disastrous Booker ceremony at which he comports himself on camera ‘worse than Howard Jacobson’ (‘impossible,’ someone interjects), Francis is recruited by Nada Television to research a European man of letters with a mysterious past and a desperately unconvincing name – Dr Bazlo Criminale. The aim is to produce a ...”

“... easy charm and an undercurrent of throwaway, slightly macho humour reminiscent of Tom Sharpe or Howard Jacobson. (A character called Smokes decides not to tell his girlfriend that he’s been unfaithful to her; after satisfying himself that he is morally justified in the deception, he reflects that ‘this scenario would have the added advantage of ...”

“... near any mountains) – or perhaps the Habsburgs, ‘an echo, too, of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna’. Howard Jacobson, writing in the Independent, speaks darkly of ‘other questions the respectable, peace-loving burghers of Austria never asked … There was a concentration camp in Amstetten … a camp for women.’ What Jelinek sees as distinctively ...”

“... scholars by passing off her psalms as his own. Psalm 23 appears – anachronistically – in Howard Jacobson’s novel The Very Model of a Man, where it is Cain who gets the chance to tell his story: ‘The Lord was our shepherd. We did not want. He fed us in green and fat pastures, gave us to drink from deep waters, made us to lie in a good fold ...”

“... years ago against the counterfeit of women’s fascination and the seductions of their tongues. As Howard Bloch points out in his short and combative study Medieval Misogyny, the flesh was seen as feminine, set in opposition to soul or mind, and the spirit wears the body like a concealing garment; to adorn this fleshly raiment with yet more artifice and paint ...”

“... my first day and that I did not even know anyone’s name. I knew the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald was Howard Lutnick and that was it. Hundreds of pictures of missing people covered a wall in the ballroom about a hundred feet long. The wall looked like a quilt. But they were all colour Xeroxes, and these women were looking for a real photograph. I imagined that it ...”