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Howard Jacobson: Thanks to Leonard Cohen, I can see the light that slips through the crack

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

These have been a serious few weeks, our country locked in profound moral debate about aesthetic judgement versus popular appreciation, the boundaries of good taste, the rights and wrongs of telling radio audiences whose granddaughter you've been knocking off, the case for universal suffrage when it comes to deciding who should win The X Factor or remain on Strictly Come Dancing.

Howard Jacobson: Read more literature and less history. That's the lesson of Hitler's deformity

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

So Hitler actually did have only one ball. I call that a pity. Not for Hitler, or even for Mrs Hitler, who might have thought that half a Hitler was better than none. But a pity for history. A pity for psychoanalysis. A pity for satire. And a pity for popular verse.

Howard Jacobson: John Sergeant, like Thatcher, is fully aware of the public's fickle nature

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

What are we going to do about democracy? Let me rejig the emphasis to give the question urgency: What are we going to do about democracy? A great sigh of relief went around the liberal world when the American people got it right and voted for Obama – that's if it turns out they really did get it right by voting for Obama – but we wouldn't have been so relieved had we been confident that democracy would choose wisely. Half my friends went to bed in a state of nervous collapse the night of the election, unable to sleep, unable to watch, dreading, expecting, and maybe in some Cassandra-like, America-hating corner of themselves, even wanting the wrong result. "See! Did I not warn you of this? Woe, woe, woe I scent the trail of blood." Which might sound more like Frankie Howerd than Cassandra, but then America's most virulent critics usually do.

Howard Jacobson: Obama's cool can translate into political substance

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

We try to keep our head in this column, no matter that all about us are losing theirs. Eleven years ago we celebrated another famous victory, staying up all night, dancing in the streets, afraid to go to bed for fear that when we woke up it would all have been a dream and Portillo was still Secretary of State for Defence. And all for Tony. All that optimism and ecstasy to vanish in a cloud of Tony. Will we never learn?

Howard Jacobson: Obama has the kind of cool that can translate into political substance

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Howard Jacobson: Russell Brand winked at me once. And when he winks at you, you stay winked

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Let's get a few things straight. The Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross affair is not a storm in a tea cup. It is the tea cup – the ultimate trivial expression of an utterly trivialised medium.

Howard Jacobson: So God 'probably' doesn't exist. Don't these atheists have any conviction?

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Something for atheistical Londoners to look forward to from January next year – 30 bendy buses carrying the message THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE. As though bendy buses aren't already distractions enough, blocking every intersection, crushing innocent cyclists (if that isn't oxymoronic), threatening to shave off anything that protrudes from your person if you aren't standing 30 feet back from the kerb. Now we'll be reduced to discussing theology with the cabbie fuming because a bendy bus is yet again preventing him from getting through the traffic lights. "It's not God that's stopping me enjoying my life, guv'nor, it's these bastards." Meaning, of course, the bendy buses not the atheists. Though then again...

Howard Jacobson: God knows, we like a mirthster, but this smart-arsery is not funny

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Nothing is sacred but not every act of satirical disrespect is funny. I say this after reading another of those lists of books which the list-compiler considers grossly over-estimated, or which he contends we only pretend to like and cannot wait for someone (such as him) to tell us we don't have to like at all. What the frisson of rubbishing great books is supposed to be in an age when no one reads great books, I cannot fathom. But it has about as much contemporary relevance as a sermon denouncing the feeding of Christians to the lions.

Howard Jacobson: Resistance is futile when in the circle of hell known as banking

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:00:01 GMT

"I want to say one word to you," Mr McGuire told Benjamin Braddock, aka Dustin Hoffman, the most famous ever graduate in movies. "Are you listening?"

Howard Jacobson: Resistance is futile when you are in the lowest circle of hell known as banking

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:00:01 GMT

"I want to say one word to you," Mr McGuire told Benjamin Braddock, aka Dustin Hoffman, the most famous ever graduate in movies. "Are you listening?"

Howard Jacobson: Oh, to be a working man again – if only for the full English breakfast

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:00:01 GMT

The thought hit me the other day – as I wouldn't be surprised to learn it has hit others in these nervous times for men in suits – that it would be wonderful to be a working man again. I say again expecting ridicule, since mine has not exactly been a life of labouring hardship. School to university to lecturing to writing doesn't make me a working man, but I am the son of a working man, imbibed from him a working man's values, and have done my share, in the spaces between softer jobs, of driving trucks and laying floors and pushing wheelbarrows of wet cement along planks so narrow that you have to have wrists of steel not to tip the contents into a ditch – and yes, I have tipped the contents into a ditch.

Howard Jacobson: So what is the legacy of the banker's greed? A cynical society – and bad art

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Some of my best friend are bankers. All right, a couple of my best friends are bankers. All right, all right, I know a banker. But even knowing only one is sufficient to make me think twice before charging the rest of them with cupidity and greed. We are all cut from the same cloth. Your banker might just as easily have been a charity worker had this or that worked out differently. And you and I, reader, might be sleeping today on mattresses stuffed with increasingly worthless bank notes if only a teacher hadn't interested us early in Sons and Lovers or The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

Howard Jacobson: Why choose between the mind and the flesh? In Italy, you can have both

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Just back from the Mantova Literary Festival, in love, as you'd expect, with all things Italian. The Mantova Literary Festival is reminiscent of the Hay Festival, which is not surprising since its padrino – as he was described to me by Italians – is Peter Florence, who turned Hay into the literary wonder of the world. In both places flags flutter, crowds of knowledgeable readers stream from one snowy pavilion to another, and writers enjoy the brief sensation of importance – competitors in a medieval tournament, come to demonstrate not only their wordsmanship but their love of virtue.

Howard Jacobson: Once you reach a certain age, Confucius makes perfect sense

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Here's an exciting thing – I've discovered Confucius. A bit late in the day, given that he is of the sixth century BC, but what's two and a half thousand years in the history of wisdom? I'm a confirmed Confucian now, anyway, though I can claim only second-hand knowledge of him, courtesy of Daniel Bell, a Canadian sociologist teaching in Beijing. And my knowledge of Daniel Bell is a bit circumscribed too, having only spoken to him down the line in a recording studio while making a programme for the World Service. I was there, since you ask, publicising my new novel, of which you can expect to hear more in future columns. But it is not set in China, that much I can tell you.

Howard Jacobson: Cyclists are malevolent, while athletes are obsessed only with themselves

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:00:01 GMT

"My mind's not right." That's a line from a Robert Lowell poem I used to teach a hundred years ago. "I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil" is another. Well, I'm not suffering the turmoil Robert Lowell did, but something must be wrong with me because I haven't been able to summon up an iota of interest in the Olympics, not in the opening ceremony (whether it was or was not fascistic: of course it was fascistic, it's fascistic to ask two people never mind two hundred thousand to do anything in unison), not in the closing ceremony (unless disgust with London's bottomlessly feeble song and celeb invitation to our place in 2012 can be called interest), not in the medals we won, not in beating Australia in the table, not in wondering when Peking became Beijing (or Bombay became Mumbai), not in trying to decide whether Boris looked a clown or perfectly expressed our shambolic individualism (forgetting about the fascism of the public schools that turn Borises out by the yard), not in any of it.

Howard Jacobson: Autumn is coming and I've got the wrong trousers. Giorgio to the rescue

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:00:01 GMT

They're back: those harbingers of winter, grown men – somebody's husband, somebody's father – grouping as excitedly as schoolboys in railway stations, dressed in the numbered shirts of their favourite fooballers. The X Factor's back as well, reheating its stale dish of fools and their dreaming. And in the shops the clothes are turning black. Goodbye to summer is what this all means.

Howard Jacobson: The calm comedy of Simon Gray was all the company you ever needed

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:00:01 GMT

I feel there must be some Shakespearean line out there, to the effect that death does not come singly, that when one person dies another person dies, by association, with him. I'm not thinking of the Donne metaphor, that we are none of us islands, that any man's death diminishes us because we are involved in mankind. It's not the universality of loss I'm speaking of but of the way a living man might stand in, in some way, for a dead one, and that we only finally register the death of the first with the death of the second. Forgive the clumsiness. It is possible I am seeking consolation in abstruseness because I cannot bear to write what I feel.

Howard Jacobson: There's much to be said for the old ways of teaching. At least they worked

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:00:01 GMT

"Read this column at your peril." And now tell me, in simple terms, what message those words convey to you. Am I encouraging you to go on reading or am I warning you to go no further? Exclude all subtle or devious explanations, as for example that I am luring you into reading by exciting you with the prospect of danger. I want an uncomplicated answer to an uncomplicated question: what does "at your peril" signal? Stop, go, or please yourself.

Howard Jacobson: Sitting on a bench in Eastbourne, where else would one want to be?

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Life isn't all bad. The next time someone asks my philosophy that's what I am going to say. "Life isn't all bad." I worked it out on holiday last week, sitting on a bench in Eastbourne. Downwind from me a brass band was playing make-the-best-of-it industrial music in the bandstand. It was just a brief holiday, barely a holiday at all in fact, more a recuperation from a holiday proper I'd had the week before. That one in southern Italy.

Howard Jacobson: We get the war criminals we deserve

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Arresting headlines all last week. "Police arrest Batman" caught the eye. "Police arrest Balls" would have been better, but Ballsing up the education of thousands is not yet considered a crime in this country. Unlike ballsing up your own disappearance which in any decent society would not be considered an offence.

Howard Jacobson: Military service, crocheting and ping-pong – that will separate the men from the boys

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:00:01 GMT

The findings of the British Crime Survey were published last week. And it's good news. Crime in this country is falling at record rates. So you only think you've been knifed.

Howard Jacobson: You can keep your good health and long life. Just give me back my pasta

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:00:01 GMT

I'm away as you're reading this. I'm aware you also might be away as you're reading this – the world now being a global village and The Independent being available in every corner of it – but it's me I'm talking about. I've come away to commit a crime. I've come away to eat pasta.

Howard Jacobson: Stop running. Slow down. And take a good long look – you'll get far more out of art

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Today I write in praise of slowness, longevity of attention, what used to be called - when we had schools - concentration. This in response to an article my fellow Independent columnist John Walsh wrote last week about that artist of the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't, Martin Creed. I won't be discussing Creed's work itself. It passes me by - which is perhaps, given Creed's commitment to evanescence, the highest compliment I can pay it. "Why do we have to look at paintings for a long time?" he asks. "Why not just look for a second?" So that's his second. What interests me more is John Walsh's high-spirited gloss on Creed's philosophy of instantaneousness. "Our response to the spectacle," he writes, meaning the spectacle of athletes dashing through the Duveen Galleries at Creed's artistic behest, "is a joyful blink, rather than a solemn, chin-stroking inspection of brushwork."

Howard Hacobson: Stop running. Slow down. And take a good long look – you'll get far more out of art

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Howard Jacobson: Watch baggage handlers at work and you too can succumb to luggage rage

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:00:01 GMT

Enough with the euphemisms. It wasn't air rage that got novelist, controversialist and supermodel Naomi Campbell into trouble, it was luggage rage. The distinction is crucial. Whatever the reason, no one wants a fellow passenger screaming and spitting when a plane's about to take off, even in first class. There is a universal decorum of flying, the slightest breach of which is unforgivable. You board, you strap yourself in, you descend into the deep depression of the helpless, you pray to the God in whom you don't believe, you take a mental farewell of everyone who has ever loved you (even if no one has ever loved you), you vow that if you live you will never do this again (which shouldn't be difficult since you don't really want to go anywhere anyway), and if you're lucky you will fall asleep and not wake until you've landed (on the ground or in Paradise). Since this is communal suffering, any individual voicing of it is plain bad manners. But at least if it's luggage rather than air fuelled - that's to say pre-dates or post-dates the actual being in the air experience - it doesn't contribute to our hysteria in the way that fits of pilot-phobia or wing-dread do.