Howard Jacobson is rather frequently, if a little unfairly, labelled “the British Philip Roth”. But what news of the actual, American Philip Roth? Well, his colossal 1997 novel American Pastoral is to be made into a film by Phillip Noyce, the Australian director of The Quiet American. Sounds good, though Roth himself is not doing the screenplay, it seems. This considerable responsibility has fallen to John Romano, one of a veritable committee of writers who penned the Cohen Brothers’ decidedly patchy 2003 effort Intolerable Cruelty.