Those who came to Britain on the Kindertransports in 1938 and ’39 are now in the twilight of their lives and finding it difficult to come to terms with their memories. One beneficiary of the transports, Henry Grenville, has recently been able to achieve a sort of closure after being given definite evidence that his parents were murdered at Auschwitz.

What is it like to be a woman soldier in the Israel Defence Forces? The 25-year-old Israeli novelist Shani Boianjiu has personal experience of it, and her answer is: a mixture of boredom, fear and sexual frustration.

James Lasdun is a British novelist and poet who has made his home in the US. His father was the distinguished architect, Sir Denys Lasdun, who designed the National Theatre. He has a Jewish background but not upbringing. Indeed, he was set to be confirmed into the Church of England at boarding school but pulled out when he realised he had no faith.

A.B. Yehoshua’s latest novel is a story in two halves. It begins in Spain, in Santiago de Compostela, where Yair Moses, an Israeli film director, has come to attend a retrospective season of his films. Like Yehoshua himself, Moses is in his 70s. He has come with Ruth, his leading lady. It feels like a great director’s last hurrah, looking back over his work — and his life.

It was one of the 19th century’s most sensational court cases. In April 1870, two young, cross-dressing homosexuals had been arrested in full drag at London’s Strand Theatre, where they had been deporting themselves outrageously, flouncing about and flirting with the men.

The wife of the Lord Mayor of London introduces this book. She tells how Harold Samuel became Britain’s “first post-war millionaire” by building up Land Securities partly through acquisition of bomb-sites whose attraction was “location, location, location”.

From the very first page of Alessandro Piperno’s second novel, you know that dark times will deluge Leo Pontecorvo, an eminent paediatric oncologist: a family dinner at his stylish Roman villa is besmirched by a TV news item, insinuating that this dashing Jewish saviour of sick children has seduced a 12-year-old girl, a friend of his own son.