Howard Jacobson is one of the most fearless commentators of our time. Shocking and subversively funny, he has a permanently fresh knack for breaking taboos like stale biscuits. In his novels and newspaper columns he is famous for his provocative eloquence, but the surprise is that he talks that way in real life, with an unmatched capacity to put a complex point of view in a string of elegantly formed declarative sentences. Talking in the library, he faces the hard questions about what it means to be Jewish in a purportedly multicultural Britain and in a world put out of joint by the turmoil in the Middle East.