Howard Jacobson
Celebrated novelist Howard Jacobson’s most recent book, Kalooki Nights, was published to wide acclaim in 2006. An acerbic cultural critic with a passion for literature and art, he is known for his ebullient wit as well as his unique take on the Jewish experience in Britain.
Howard Jacobson: If what we watch or read can move us to compassion, it can move us to sadism too
I have always had a soft spot, against my own interests and predilections, for the censorious of mind – Jeremiah, Jonathan Edwards, Malvolio, Mrs Mary Whitehouse. I fought my English teacher at school about Malvolio. He accepted at face value the view of him expressed by Sir Toby Belch and the other carousers and tormentors in Twelfth Night – as a killjoy who thought because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale, yet fell at the first temptation to pleasure that came his way.
Recently by Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson: The first step on the road to wisdom is admitting that you don't know anything
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Remember Keats's "negative capability ... being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts"? Whatever happened to that? Now everyone is sure about everything – when a foetus becomes a person, the rights and wrongs of simulating life, how little or how much a child has to gain from looking into the eyes of a father. Verily I say unto you, not Solomon in all his wisdom was as puffed with the vain conceit of certainty as we are ...
Howard Jacobson: Rebel too strongly against seriousness and what do you end up with? Boris Johnson
Saturday, 17 May 2008
There are actually people out there seriously discussing Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister after David Cameron – a sort of Lord of the Bedchamber-in-waiting. But don't think Gordon Brown chewing on shadows for a decade in the dark hinterland cast by Tony's glitter; this is to be a suave succession of toffs. Men, at least, who have been taught manners. "After you." "No, after you." England returned to its natural legislators, right-honourables with confidence and quiffs. David, Boris, and thereafter some podgy, deeply unserious blue-eyed Fauntleroy presently fagging at Eton.
Howard Jacobson: If there really is a smear campaign to try to silence the critics of Israel, it isn't working
Saturday, 10 May 2008
I wonder if I might take robust issue with an article my fellow columnist Johann Hari wrote last week, in which he complained about a "campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people". In so far as he feels it personally, I sympathise with him. It is infuriating to be contradicted when you know you're right, or to have your motives impugned, or to be in any way misrepresented, no matter that you are well equipped to handle your detractors.
Howard Jacobson: No need to be surprised when a house of horrors turns up on a quiet provincial street
Saturday, 3 May 2008
How could this happen here, they are asking in the unremarkable provincial Austrian town of Amstetten, home to Josef Fritzl, dungeon to his daughter and their incestuous offspring. And to think that such a thing could have been taking place under our very noses, and he such a charming man, and they – those that were visible – such lovely, quiet people.
Howard Jacobson: I lay on my sun bed and enjoyed the most perfect reading experience you can imagine
Saturday, 26 April 2008
Discovered a new pleasure: lying on the beach reading writers describing lying on the beach. It's awkward reading on the beach if you're not sufficiently flexuous to get the right degree of shoulderly twist to read the words, or the right degree of cranial lift to turn the page, and if you don't have the bodily or astronomical savvy to work out how to get the sun on the book but not on you. But that's the joy of reading about someone who manages it no better.
Howard Jacobson: Which is more depraved: Nazi role-playing in sex games or the horrors of motor sport?
Saturday, 5 April 2008
I might need help with this one. "Yes, psychiatric help," I hear the unsympathetic saying, but that's not the help I'm talking about. I mean help in the explanation sense, as in explain to me why a man shouldn't indulge in a bit of retro-Nazi sado-masochistic role-play in the quiet of a house of ill-repute in leafy Chelsea when the fancy takes him, provided no one gets seriously hurt in the process – other than, one hopes for his sake, himself.
Howard Jacobson: If you say you want a revolution, it's obvious you're sitting uncomfortably in economy
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Half-caught a minute or two of that suave revolutionary Tariq Ali on Desert Island Discs last week. Revolution and Desert Island Discs – I mean no mischief by pointing out the conjunction. The wildest of us must accommodate to society's blandishments at last. We age, we mellow, we want to lie on deserted beaches listening to gramophone records.
Howard Jacobson: The heart has its allegiances, to places as well as people. And a country is both
Saturday, 22 March 2008
A man has put his life up for sale on eBay. House, car, motorbike, jet-skis, spa, friends, job, the lot. Not quite the lot. You don't get the wife. He doesn't either, which is why he's selling up. What are friends, jet-skis, motorbike and spa worth if you no longer have a wife who loves you to enjoy them with? But allowing that the life you'd be buying – wifeless or not – is in Perth, Western Australia, my advice would be to snap it up.
Howard Jacobson: So much more could have been done to liberate people from the confines of class
Saturday, 15 March 2008
Not often I say this, but I'm feeling sorry for the BBC. Specifically for BBC2 whose series White – Is White Working Class Britain Becoming Invisible has drawn criticism from people of all colours, classes and visibility.
Howard Jacobson: Many are the ways we might feel frightened, embarrassed – or just not at home
Saturday, 8 March 2008
Another week, another inanity. If it's not Balls it's Hodge. Not schools this time, the Proms. New Labour, New Culture. Only for New Culture, read No Culture. Alternatively, Hodgepodge.
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Columnist Comments
• Dominic Lawson: Don't blame free trade for food price rises
Sometimes an entire philosophy can be glimpsed in a single remark
• Joan Bakewell: If I feel like having a cigarette, why shouldn't I?
I feel the need to have a small cache hidden around the house
• Terence Blacker: Why do people have to be such wusses?
We must fight back against the wussification of our culture – even if we have to do it one wuss at a time
Most popular in Opinion
Read
1 Catherine Townsend: Sleeping Around
3 Ali Allawi: This raises huge questions over our independence
4 Joan Bakewell: If I feel like having a cigarette, why shouldn't I?
5 Baratunde Thurston: I used to be cynical about my country. No longer...
6 Terence Blacker: Why do people have to be such wusses?
7 Rupert Cornwell: Barack Obama has inspired a generation, but his toughest battles are yet to come
8 Joan Smith: So how many more women must die?
9 Dominic Lawson: Don't blame free trade for food price rises
Emailed
2 Ali Allawi: This raises huge questions over our independence
3 Catherine Townsend: Sleeping Around
4 Dominic Lawson: The staggering cost of renewable energy
5 Johann Hari: Israel is suppressing a secret it must face
6 Steve Richards: If only we could see such audacity of hope
7 Johann Hari: I was wrong, terribly wrong - and the evidence should have been clear all along
8 Leading article: The world ignores these farmers at its peril
9 Miles Kington Remembered: Stuck on misleading messages in car windows
Commented
1 Catherine Townsend: Sleeping Around
2 Ali Allawi: This raises huge questions over our independence
3 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: A lament for the death of the left as a political force
4 Rupert Cornwell: Barack Obama has inspired a generation, but his toughest battles are yet to come
6 Joan Bakewell: If I feel like having a cigarette, why shouldn't I?
7 You Write the Caption - 03/06/08
8 Bruce Anderson: We are destroying the very values which could save us in our battle against Islam
9 Joan Smith: Sharon's lipstick diplomacy suits the Dalai Lama
10 Mary Dejevsky: So, when will a woman be elected president?
The Independent On Sunday
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