His early attempts at writing fiction were inauthentic pastiches of his literary heroes: ‘I wanted to be Henry James or Jane Austen and write elegantly of country houses’, as he told Angela Wintle ( Wintle 2013: 9).

As an adolescent Jacobson became, in his own self-satirical account, ‘a stuck-up little bastard who went everywhere with a copy of Women in Love under my arm and an expression of disdain on my face’ ( Jacobson 2012a: 200) and after graduating from Cambridge Jacobson wrote his first book, a study of four Shakespeare tragedies co-authored with Wilbur Sanders, but, as he told O’Brien, ‘I never really believed that that was the real thing’ ( O’Brien 2019). Jacobson demonstrated precocious literary talent as a boy – he likes to tell the story of how a primary schoolteacher wrote a letter to his mother, which she framed, declaring that Jacobson was destined ‘to become an important writer’ ( Wintle 2013: 9), and he told James O’Brien that he ‘wrote a little play when I was nine’ ( O’Brien 2019) – but in spite of these auspicious beginnings, he felt constrained by his background: ‘being a working-class Manchester boy the omens didn’t feel right’ ( O’Brien 2019).

That one might be a serious novelist while also ‘being funny’ was the great epiphany that launched Jacobson’s career as a novelist.

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