Column by David in The Times.

HOWARD JACOBSON ONCE REALLY pissed me off. This is what happened. About seven years ago, he was making a documentary for The South Bank Show, about “The Novel”, and he rang me up, asking for an interview. I knew him a bit, my second novel had just come out, and I was of course flattered by the idea, so said yes. He came to my house, we filmed for about three hours, and I was pleased with it: as a celebrity – even then it was something of a dirty word – and a novelist, one expects only sneering from the literary classes, but the interview was, I thought, cerebral, respectful, funny, and insightful, conforming in my mind no doubt to a preimagined idea of this meeting of two Jewish men of letters.

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Column by David in The Times.

LAST WEEK I WAS AT THE inaugural Rome Fiction Festival. At last, I presume some of you are thinking, a proper first sentence for a Books column – those who aren’t thinking: is it Jeanette Winterson’s turn again this week? Unfortunately, the Rome Fiction Festival is not a book festival. It’s not even, as I at first presumed, a festival celebrating all types of fiction, books included. It’s a television festival – fiction, in Italian, means specifically fiction on television, dramas, mini-series and comedies (the word for fiction as in novels is romanzo).

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