Writer and broadcaster Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester in 1942 and educated at the University of Cambridge. He has published 16 novels including the Booker prize-winning The Finkler Question (2010), Shylock Is My Name (2016) and Pussy (2017); a collection of his journalism, Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It, was published in 2011. Jacobson has taught at the University of Sydney and at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His latest book, Live a Little, has just been published by Jonathan Cape.
1. Opera
Snobbery has stopped me going to Holland Park opera in the past. It would be provincial, I’d always thought – the singers culled from the Notting Hill operatic society and the scenery bought on Portobello Road. I couldn’t have been more wrong. A sweet tenor, an agonised baritone, and two exquisite sopranos navigated Verdi’s passages from lyricism to mockery with great subtlety, sometimes alone, sometimes in two, sometimes all at once. No one beats Verdi at rendering the gorgeous cacophony of desire and rage. The night quivered. The orchestra thrilled. The wind blew through the grand marquee, and I became a devotee.
2. Art
Adoration of the Magi, Uffizi, Florence
Hoping to avoid queuing for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence I go armed with a skip-the-line ticket. What they don’t tell you is that there’s a skip-the-line line. What seems like days later I follow the crowd past the thousand Filippo Lippi Madonnas in varying degrees of maternal reverie. You have to be in the mood. But then this luscious Dürer, in which the baby Jesus, bored with being adored, tries poking his sticky fingers into a gold casket presented by a bemused Magus. The baby Jesus being a real baby almost justifies the queuing.
3. Theatre
Mamet’s new play was almost as funny as I hoped, but not as shocking as Oleanna on the ambiguities of seduction. Put simply, there were none. Not if but how was the question, Mamet staging the chess game of harassment brilliantly, but it was always harassment. John Malkovich’s masterly portrayal of a Harvey Weinsteinish mogul flirted with the tragedy of self-disgust and made one half expect grandeur to emerge from self-engrossment, but in the end he was just a pig with a rancid view of the world. But since no one articulates rancour better than Mamet, I went home in cheerfully disgusted spirits.
4. Book
Michael Oakeshott’s books of political theory are not what you’d call beach reads, but then I don’t go to the beach. Oakeshott was a political theorist whose years coincided almost exactly with the 20th century’s. Considered too conservative by some, he isn’t by me, though I’m not going to pretend I’m steeped in his work. Here’s a flavour. “The task of the teacher is to free his pupils from servitude to the present.” A sentence that puts to shame our lickspittle universities. Eschew servitude to the present – if I owned a T-shirt I’d want that printed on it.
5. Restaurant
It was seeing mince and potatoes on the menu that first brought me here and I’ve been ordering it ever since. What craving the dish satisfies I’m not sure. Comfort? Plenty? I get both from the restaurant itself, which has come to seem like a club to me. I love its grand cafe atmosphere, so conducive to conversation; the humorous (or do I mean humouring?) service; the best Sunday roast in London – the fact that they know how rare my wife likes her beef and how many slices of it I do; breakfast; afternoon tea; high tea; mince and potatoes.
6. Television
As good as anything I’ve seen on television, quite possibly ever. Here’s what I won’t forget. Stephen Graham’s defeated “sorries” – a mantra of apologies, to himself not least, as though for his very existence. Helen Behan’s voluminous swearing, coining a sort of lyric grace out of the basest materials. Niamh Algar’s soul-locked wild girl, alternately sassy and desolated, denied fulfilment at every turn. Add to those the most subtly paced direction, allowing memory itself to breathe; marvellous cinematography which evoked the agony of the ordinary; and writing that shrank neither from heaven nor from hell. Eat your heart out, Dostoevsky.
7. Film
Normally I suspect a film that everybody likes. You have to beware getting caught up in crazes for new films, otherwise known as servitude to the present. But Roma shows you what all the other films you’ve liked never quite pulled off. Its vocabulary is wholly filmic. No other medium haunts its margins. From the soapy-water of the opening titles to the terrifying ocean scenes towards the end, the film hears and watches in a way no novel or play can. This is what a big screen’s for: to reflect the multitudinousness of life itself.
