Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough: ‘highly readable but thoroughly depressing’
Timely analysis of how Britain has helped to launder others’ fortunes

In this “brilliantly funny” and “bittersweet” memoir, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson looks back on his tormented early life, said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times. He emerged, he shows, from “irreconcilable elements”: Anita, his Lithuanian-descended mother, was a woman of “apocalyptic pessimism”, while his father Max, whose roots were Ukrainian, had a “bouncier demeanour”.
As the title – Mother’s Boy – suggests, Jacobson was closer to his mother in temperament. “As a teenager he devoured literature, but was hopeless at the things that were meant to make a macher,” – a player, the sort of man of whom his father approved.
After grammar school, he went to Cambridge and studied under the “influential literary critic F.R. Leavis”, who taught “clever young men” to worship Jane Austen, Henry James and other novelists in the Great Tradition. This ushered Jacobson into his first career – as a lecturer in English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic – but had a “deleterious effect” on his own writing ambitions. “Since I couldn’t be Dickens,” he recalls, “I couldn’t be anybody.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Despite believing that he was “put on Earth to write”, it wasn’t until he was 40 that Jacobson published his first novel, said Frances Wilson in The Spectator. In the meantime, he was deeply unhappy – by his own estimation “a failed husband, a failed father, a failed university lecturer”.
What finally got him over his writer’s block was the realisation that he shouldn’t shrink from his Jewishness; instead, he could embrace it unapologetically in his work – and as a result he “broke new ground”, becoming Britain’s answer to Philip Roth. Both “very funny” and “profoundly serious”, Mother’s Boy is a superb memoir. “If there is a better contemporary account of the cost of becoming a writer I’ve yet to read it.”
Jonathan Cape 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99
The Week Bookshop
To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
How wild horses are preventing wildfires in Spain
Under The Radar The animals roam more than 5,700 hectares of public forest, reducing the volume of combustible vegetation in the landscape
By Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK Published
-
The Week contest: Soundproof web
Puzzles and Quizzes
By The Week US Published
-
6 dream homes with chef’s kitchens
Feature Featuring a house with two kitchen islands in Utah and a kitchen with a stove nook in New York
By The Week US Published
-
6 dream homes with chef’s kitchens
Feature Featuring a house with two kitchen islands in Utah and a kitchen with a stove nook in New York
By The Week US Published
-
Warfare: an 'honest' account of brutal engagement in Iraq
The Week Recommends Alex Garland's film focuses on the 'overwhelming, sensory journey' of conflict
By The Week UK Published
-
Is This Working?: a 'strangely gripping' look at British working life
The Week Recommends Author Charlie Colenutt weaves an 'utterly fascinating and thoroughly depressing' history of jobs
By The Week UK Published
-
Critics’ choice: Restaurants worthy of their buzz
feature A fun bistro, a reservation worth the wait, and a modern twist on Mexican dishes
By The Week US Published
-
Film reviews: Snow White, Death of a Unicorn, and The Alto Knights
Feature A makeover for Disney’s first animated feature, greedy humans earn nature’s wrath, and a feud between crime bosses rattles the mob
By The Week US Published
-
Art review: Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Feature Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through Aug. 2
By The Week US Published
-
Max Allan Collins’ 6 favorite books that feature private detectives
Feature The mystery writer recommends works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and more
By The Week US Published
-
Book reviews: ‘Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America’ and ‘How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998’
Feature A political ‘witch hunt’ and Helen Garner’s journal entries
By The Week US Published