Yasir Arafat was never very convincing on television. His English was always thickly accented and halting, his ever-present smile looked insincere and the military uniform he wore, allied to his diminutive height, made him appear slightly ridiculous.

Thomas Buergenthal believes in justice. This is not just heartwarming but remarkable because this is a man who has witnessed some of the most depraved behaviour in human history.

Amother bringing up two primary school-aged children will have plenty of problems to solve. How are the kids getting on at school? Are they making friends? Do they have issues with anger or frustration?

Daniel Sieberg's wife used to have a nickname for him. She called him "glow worm" because every night when the lights were off, his face was always illuminated by some kind of screen.

She began to get frustrated by her husband's compulsive online behaviour. He would be on social networking sites or surfing the internet and their relationship began to suffer.

Like many people at the start of the year, Zoe Strimpel is on a diet. However, for her it is not the cakes and pastries which are being rationed but rather men.

Bennett Arron is used to being in a minority of one. As a boy growing up just outside the Welsh steel town of Port Talbot he was the only Jew in the village.

Sophie Solomon never wanted to be a violinist.

She may have started playing at the age of two, been selected for the National Youth Orchestra, been a classical music scholar at her public school, and even been heralded as one of the most talented violinists of her generation, but all Solomon wanted to do was learn Russian.

So instead of becoming a concert violinist, she read modern history a

Miriam Elia is attempting to come up with a definition of conceptual art.

Although she has made a considerable reputation for herself as a stand-up comedian and Radio 4 comedy writer, Elia defines herself as an artist and her comedy as such too.

Her latest work, an installation entitled I Fell in Love With a Conceptual Artist… And It Was Totally Meaningless, could equally be a piece of com

If you happened, like me, to be a sports-mad Jewish teenager growing up in the early 1980s, there were very few British-Jewish sporting role models. There was, if I remember correctly, a fairly high-ranking table tennis player and one or two professional footballers slogging away in the lower leagues.

Albie Sachs has no recollection of April 7 1988 beyond the fact that he was intending to go for a run on the beach near his home in Maputo, Mozambique. He remembers leaving his apartment with some cold beers which he planned to drink as an after-run treat. He subsequently found out that as he unlocked the driver's door of his Honda there was a huge explosion.