The man responsible for the iconic London Olympic Games cauldron, Thomas Heatherwick, will be one of the highlight speakers at this year’s Jewish Book Week. Mr Heatherwick, whose Jewish grandmother fled Nazi Germany to come to London, will speak about his art and new book, Thomas Heatherwick: Making.

Only two? Jonathan Miller, famous practically since puberty, first burst upon the world as part of the legendary Beyond the Fringe team.

The reinvention of British comedy would be enough for most people, but Miller was running a concurrent career as a neurologist and also displaying his transformative genius as a director of theatre, television and opera.

"Naked” connotes truth. “Nude” was about beauty. Naked Nude thus confronts an old urge to the transcendent with uglier fact. That is the theme of this seductive book. Modernism is the crux: a movement which saw two millennia of classical standards as constricting and prohibitive.

At the heart of this fine and moving book by a highly respected American Jewish psychoanalyst living in London is a universal theme that itself is at the heart of human existence: how change involves loss.

The start of A M Homes’s new novel, is truly to die for: the action is murderous, and the shattering of successful lives delivered with g-force intensity. Homes sets brothers Harry and George Silver (an Esau and Jacob of the heavily health-insured, SUV generation) against each other.

In this provocative, playful, speculative journey through the rich, centuries-old heritage of Jewish literature, father and daughter Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger propose a “textline” rather than a bloodline — a notion of Jewish lineage that is etched not in blood but in words, spoken and written.