Halls Green, outside Sevenoaks in Kent, was once a woodland activities centre for children, run by a Christian charity. But the newest residents will not be spending their days abseiling or shooting arrows.

The teenage boys of what is now the Yeshivah Gedolah Torah Veyirah will study in the garden of England, a world away from the inner-city streets of London's Stamford Hill.

Lynne Franks: Tell me about your background.
Julia Hobsbawm: My mother was a refugee from Vienna and came to the UK just after the Anschluss in 1938, to Manchester, and spent the first three years here trying to get as many relatives out as possible. My father [the historian Eric Hobsbawm] was originally from Berlin.

In Rabbi Jonathan Romain's conversion class, there have been couples converting together, religious Christians, an ex-Muslim convert, policemen, soldiers and housewives.

But although converts come to him from all walks of life, as the Movement for Reform Judaism's conversion expert Rabbi Romain has identified some key trends.

For a man approaching 50, 2011 turned out to be a year of personal growth and discovery when I might have assumed I knew all there was to know about myself. Never particularly ambitious and more interested in knowing a little about a lot than being a specialist (and therefore not a bad person to have on your table at a supper quiz), I have tended not to wander far from my area of comfort.

In Nightingale's South London care home, you'll see Singer sewing machines, old family photographs and other trinkets associated with the past.

With about two-thirds of Nightingale's 200 residents suffering from dementia, the intention is to trigger memories, acknowledging that the needs of today's elderly people are different from their predecessors'.

Anyone who has ever attempted to dine out with a toddler in tow will know that it can be a stressful experience. Small children have a tendency to shout loudly, to refuse to eat unfamiliar foods, and occasionally to jettison unwanted items on the laps of people at neighbouring tables.

Writer, composer, art expert, educationist - George Whyte modestly concedes, when it is put to him, that he is a man of many parts, and adds: "All of them Jewish".

In the playground of Ilford Jewish Primary School, Chinese pupils race with boys in kippot. At King David in Birmingham, the Ivrit prize in assembly could go to Shimon or Shabina.

For the schools which must accept non-Jewish pupils, the atmosphere is harmonious, albeit after considerable challenges.

At Kol Nidre this year, a visitor would have been able to walk into Hendon United Synagogue in north-west London and comfortably find a seat. Twenty years ago, for one of the 25 biggest congregations in the country not to have been full would have been inconceivable.

Imagine a cross between Jeremy Paxman and Jonathan Ross, with a twist of Daniel Craig-style good looks and a soupçon of Ian McEwan, and you are on the way to de-coding Yair Lapid.

I first met Mark Sofer in a humid Mumbai car-park in November 2008. The multiple terror attacks on the city - which included an assault on a Chabad centre - were still in progress, Israeli security teams were scouring mortuaries to discover how many of the country's nationals had been killed, and the Israeli ambassador had agreed to give an impromptu briefing to reporters outside the consulate.

I was looking at a photograph of George Best when I had my eureka moment.

It was 1968 and, as a young entrepreneur in my 20s, I was running a company called Star Posters, which had just launched a series of products aimed at the new, affluent youth market - Frank Zappa sitting on a lavatory seat, Jimi Hendrix "making love" to his guitar.

It's official - Dr David Gerbi still has his sense of humour. And given what happened to the 56-year-old psychiatrist earlier this year, that is quite surprising.

Two days after Yom Kippur, Gerbi had to leave Libya in a hurry after hundreds of protesters called for his deportation. He even received death threats. His crime? Defiling an "archaeological site".

My mother's father, Itzhak Gutkind, grew up in a three-storey townhouse in Brzeziny, a small but bustling city at the heart of Poland's textile industry.

Theodore Zeldin believes conversation has the power to change the world. Not a chance remark, and certainly not small talk, but the kind of meaningful exchange of ideas we tend deliberately to avoid in social situations.

Now the celebrated philosopher and historian is travelling the world holding talk-fests where people begin to discuss a topic with a complete stranger,

It is a rare Arab leader who says the Arab world can learn from Israel. But Hassan bin Talal, Prince of Jordan, is a realist, a pragmatist and one of the most outspoken reformers in the Middle East.

He praises Israel's "tenacity of purpose - to draw your line in the sand and say, here I will stand, to promote a shared public interest, in which all my population can participate.

It could be the closing scene of a feel-good film. But it will happen for real, tomorrow afternoon. Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman, mocked for years for his off-the-wall theory, has not only been proved correct, but he will climb to the podium at Stockholm Concert Hall and receive the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The award is often shared by several people , but he has it all to himself.

If you cut David Frum, there is every possibility his blood would run Republican Party blue.

There were flames everywhere, clouds of ash, and a smell that left you gasping for air. There was fear, as people ran from their homes, and tears, as 44 people died.