I have spent less than three minutes in the company of Jared Diamond and he assures me that he does not pose a threat to my life.

“I can promise you that I have not made a move to kill you yet. Nor have I detected any move on your part to kill me. But in a traditional society both of us would have made a move to kill each other by now, or else run away,” he says solemnly.

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.

Introduce toddlers to the eco-friendly message of Tu Bishvat (January 25) with Thank You Trees, a board book by Gail Langer Karowski and Marilyn E. Gootman (Kar-Ben, £4.99). The rhymes are not exactly Dr Seuss, but Kristen Balouch’s friendly illustrations will stimulate discussion.

The Misunderstanding is a meditation on the nature of unhappiness. Denise is in love with Yves who hates himself. As Denise becomes infected with a sense of self-destruction following Yves’s fall from financial grace, her urbane mother advises her to take a second suitor. She picks her raffish young cousin Jaja, who plays the ardent lover to her coy beloved.

A conservative estimate of the number of victims of mass murder since the beginning of the 20th century is 83 million. Add the victims of deliberate famine and the estimated total rises to between 127 and 175 million.

I first heard Moshe Dayan’s name when I was nine. It was June 1 1967. Israel was surrounded by Arab armies poised to attack. And it was my birthday. My dad gave me a big hug and said: “Son, the state of Israel has given you a birthday present — they’ve just nominated Moshe Dayan to the post of Defence Minister!”

If it’s true that all literature is about death, then Will Self’s new Man Booker-longlisted homage to the modernist novel is exemplary. It is all about Death, specifically Audrey Death, a victim of encephalitis lethargia, or “sleeping sickness”.

Richard Ford is one of America’s leading writers, best known for The Sportswriter (1986). Born in Mississippi, he has a dark sense of life in modern America, but none of his previous novels are as dark as Canada, which, the first sentence tells us, is a story of robbery and murders.

Alice Herz-Sommer is 108 years old. She is a true survivor of the 20th century.