You're listening to Unfiltered with James O'Brien, brought to you by Joe.

Hello and welcome to Unfiltered with me James O'Brien featuring this week the journalist

author former newspaper columnist and there's a description of him I'm going to employ quite

early on in the interview but I won't spoil the surprise by telling you now what it is. I speak of Howard Jacobson, book a prize winner and author of some 15 novels, also recently some really trenchant journalism about things like Brexit and Trump, so I'm pretty confident that we'll have plenty to talk about.

I'm going to add something right at the beginning to that description and I'm going to gauge your reaction. I'm going to say public intellectual. Is that a thing?

That's all right. Are you? Yes, yes. I should hope so. Yes. Public intellectual. It's quite

an un-English. It has a tiny bit something slightly sleazy. I'm doing something in public.

This is good. That is good. Well that would be the English. I'm doing something in public that I ought to be doing in private.

Well that would be the English attitude to intellectuals, isn't it?

This is good, that's good.

In many ways.

Now, the way unfiltered works is there are no rules and there are no there are no limit.

So we'll begin at the beginning if we may which is in 1942 during a bombing

far back that far back in during a bombing raid in Manchester.

Pressbury in Cheshire.

Is that right?

Yep.

The nursing home where my mother labored with me.

Hard labor, apparently. Was it? She says, got big

head. Big baby, yeah, I was a big big baby. So I don't think I'm much

I was much bigger than Prince Louis. Oh, he's a big lad. How was that kind of size, 8 pounds, something I was in there.

And what sort of family were you born into?

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