Zach Braff begins by wishing me a hearty "Shalom!"

The American actor-director, well known for his role as Doctor J D in the award-winning television series Scrubs, is in London ahead of making his UK stage debut in his first penned play, the comedy All New People.

How serious do classical musicians have to be? The young American pianist Jonathan Biss has been proving that sophisticated artistry and off-the-wall humour are in no way mutually exclusive. A glance at his website quickly shows that his tale has an unusual twist.

The House of Silk, the new Sherlock Holmes novel by Anthony Horowitz, could be sub-titled "The Mystery of the Vanishing Novelist". For Horowitz's aim was "to be completely true to Arthur Conan Doyle - immerse myself in his world and be invisible in it."

'I believe that energy has to be used to get more energy," says Bernard Kops. And his is a remarkable energy. He has written more than 40 plays for television, stage and radio, nine novels, seven volumes of poetry and two autobiographies.

'It's a scary time. I'm not young - I'm 66 - and I don't know what's coming next," confesses Ruth Leon, as if answering the question written on the cover of her memoir.

Called But What Comes After?, it describes Leon's relationship with Sheridan Morley -the biographer, theatre critic and broadcaster to whom she was married until his death in 2007.

Jesse Eisenberg is still feeling the effects of his Oscar-nominated performance as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, and it is making him uncomfortable.

The news that the Royal Shakespeare Company is to stage another major production of The Merchant of Venice would have been met with world-weary sighs in some quarters.

Two days before interviewing Vidal Sassoon, news arrives that he has cancelled all but our meeting to attend the funeral of a friend and fellow hairdresser, Joshua Galvin. I'm flattered, of course. But will the man who revolutionised hairdressing in the Swinging Sixties, and whose life is now the subject of an entertaining new documentary and a colourful memoir be in the mood for a conversation?

People tend to recognise Adam Goldberg's face before his name. He is the actor most remembered for playing the Jewish soldier Private Mellish in Saving Private Ryan and Eddie Meneuk, Chandler's scene-stealing, reality-challenged roommate, in Friends.

Michael Grade is not the man he was. When we last met, a long time ago now, he was everything that the caricatures made of him. He sat in a plush office, red braces and red socks, smoking a giant cigar. As boss of Channel 4 at the time, he was every bit the big mogul.

As Yaniv “Nev” Schulman points out, he’s got a fair amount in common with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.

Both are 26, from Jewish families in New York and live enviable lives surrounded by the latest in geek-dream software. And for both, being part of what Schulman calls “the first Facebook generation” has had unimaginable consequences.

How can you make a sitcom about Shabbat, and never mention the J-word? Friday Night Dinner writer Robert Popper explains that the rituals of Friday night with the family resonate beyond Golders Green and Edgware.

James Franco seems to be everywhere these day in all kinds of different guises.

Eran Riklis bristles when he is described as "political". But the Israeli filmmaker says it is a label he has had to accept, albeit with trepidation. "The word political is complicated. I used to say my films were not political, and people would smile and say 'Oh OK'."

Riklis, 56, first received worldwide attention for his 2008 film Lemon Tree, about a Palestinian widow whose lemon grove is set to be demolished to make way for the house of an Israeli security minister. Surely Israeli films do not get more political than that?

Peter Kosminsky cannot be accused of dodging the difficult assignments. He has made films about British soldiers in Bosnia, about the Falklands War, and the conflict in Northern Ireland. On one occasion while making a documentary about Soviet conscripts in Afghanistan he was marooned on a rocky mountainside for days as shells whizzed past his ears.

If you go to the Royal Festival Hall this Sunday, listen out for a lot of Hungarian around the foyers. Speakers of this fearsomely complex language will be out in force: January 16 marks the London launch of both the Hungarian presidency of the European Union and the bicentenary year of that Hungarian-born musical legend, Franz Liszt.

'I wasn't supposed to have become a musician," says the 63-year-old Latvian-born cellist, Mischa Maisky, in a thick Baltic accent. "With two older siblings already studying music, my mother wanted me to be 'normal'."

In fact, he was anything but. "I was a hyper-active child, running around all the time playing football and never sitting still for a moment, so it came as a great surprise when I suddenly announced I wanted to play the cello."

Darren Aronofsky became fascinated by madness - specifically paranoid schizophrenia - while working on first feature film, Pi. Set among New York's Orthodox Jewish community, its main character, Max Cohen, is a troubled number theorist who believes he may have discovered the numerical code which can explain everything in Creation, and ends up taking a power drill to his head in what must be one of the few scenes of self-trepanning in cinema history.

You can hope, but I don't think you can plan for it. That would be dangerous," says wise James Bierman about success.

Bierman knows a lot about the subject. As executive producer of the Donmar Warehouse he oversaw and was largely responsible for the theatre's greatest era - a period so great that it even overshadowed Sam Mendes's tenure in the job, and Mendes managed to persuade Nicole Kidman to appear at the 250-seat Covent Garden venue.

Those heady days seem relatively tame compared to the heights reached by the Donmar under Bierman, and the artistic director Michael Grandage.

What's eating Stacey Solomon? In the past few weeks, the Dagenham diva emerged triumphant from the Australian jungle as winner of I'm a Celebrity… and made an emotional return to the X Factor. She is widely feted for her bubbly girl-next-door naturalness and generally regarded as the nation's sweetheart. Everything in the garden should be rosy. So what's the problem?

First of all she has had enough of reality TV. Then she is anxious about her employment prospects and craves a steady job. And to cap it all, she has got a bone to pick with Simon Cowell.