[3] He was brought up in Prestwich, and educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, Greater Manchester[4] before going on to study English at Downing College, Cambridge, under F. R.
[7] Jacobson's time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic that plans to merge facilities with a local football club.
He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.
His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage ping-pong champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing.
[8] It is set in the Manchester of the 1950s and Jacobson, himself a table tennis fan in his teenage years, admits that there is more than an element of autobiography in it.
– the central character of which is a Jewish luggage baron of South London – and his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
[13] The book, published by Bloomsbury, explores what it means to be Jewish today and is also about "love, loss and male friendship".
[14] Andrew Motion, the chair of the judges, said: "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle.
[17] His two non-fiction books – Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993) and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997) – were turned into television series.
[19] On 3 November 2010, Jacobson appeared in an Intelligence Squared debate (stop bashing Christians, Britain is becoming an anti-Christian country) in favour of the motion.
His musical choices included works by J. S. Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Louis Armstrong as well as the rare 1964 single "Look at Me" by the Whirlwinds.
Before leaving Cambridge they attended a party where amongst the guests were the playwright Simon Gray, and Germaine Greer, whose job Jacobson was filling in Sydney.
In 2005, Jacobson was married for the third time, to radio and TV documentary maker Jenny De Yong.
[28] In recent times, Jacobson has, on several occasions, attacked anti-Israel boycotts, and for this reason has been labelled a "liberal Zionist".
[31] In September 2018, Jacobson argued in favour of the motion "Jeremy Corbyn is Unfit to be Prime Minister" in a debate hosted by Intelligence Squared.