Arno Lustiger, who died in Frankfurt on 15 May at the age of 88, was a Holocaust survivor and scholar who will be remembered for his research on Jewish resistance to the Nazis and on Gentiles who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.

His pen-name was created from two characters in Grimm's fairy tales, but his novels had little in common with the moralistic fantasies of mittel-Europe. Rudolf Ditzen was a magistrate's son, raised in Berlin and immersed in Dickens, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. He became one of the greatest German authors of the 20th century, but was not translated into English until 2009.

An octogenarian Holocaust survivor has won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for a novel loosely based on his experiences during the Second World War in which he escaped from a labour camp.

Thaer Halahleh wrote a letter to his wife, Shireen, from an Israeli jail in February: "My detention has been renewed seven times and they still haven't charged me. I can't take it any more." Then the 34-year-old began a hunger strike, as did Bilal Diab. That was 77 days ago. Both are Palestinians, fathers. Eight others have been on the same silent, self-wasting, wasted protest. Halahleh, Diab and others may well be dead by the time you read this.

It is in the nature of many great novels to create worlds of their own, entire ecosystems that may be wildly different from the reader's own experience and are yet so vivid as to become real. The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis is one such.

This moving and scrupulous history recreates a world on the edge of its extinction.

It says much about Benjamin Netanyahu's world class political skills that no one outside his circle had advance knowledge of the bold stroke by which he brought the centrist opposition Kadima party into the Israeli government in the early hours of Tuesday.

A secret intelligence report - compiled just as Hitler embarked on the Final Solution - found the Nazi leader had a "messiah complex" and increasingly turned to "Jew-phobia" as defeat loomed.

The far right is on the rise, in Europe as in the US. We don't need Marine Le Pen's surprise vote of 18 per cent in the first round of the French presidentials to tell us that. What it does tell us, however, and what has been so little understood so far, is the extent to which the far right has become part of the mainstream of politics, changing itself from the neo-fascist beliefs it espoused in the past to something much more moderated in its language as in its policies.

To modern readers, many 1930s writers might as well be using Shakespearian English, such is the grace and complexity of their language. Is this why Elizabeth Jenkins has disappeared from bookshops?

Reasons to be cheerful

The New York-based, Italian-born artist-photographer Paolo Ventura works by building and then photographing his own extraordinarily detailed models and dioramas; whole miniature worlds have a strange, half-remembered or dream-like quality.

For two decades, Mel Gibson was at the top of the Hollywood tree. Building on his successes as an actor, he won an Oscar in 1996 for directing Braveheart and routinely commanded salaries of more than $20 million.

For two decades, Mel Gibson was at the top of the Hollywood tree. Building on his successes as an actor, he won an Oscar in 1996 for directing Braveheart and routinely commanded salaries of more than $20 million.