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Those of us who have never endured occupation can find it difficult to judge the behaviour of some who have. The lines between survival, passive cooperation and active collaboration are not always clear. Following the second world war, the myths of resistance, especially in France, were deliberately inflated in order to hide the humiliation and deep wounds occasioned by collaboration, which was far more widespread. Understandably sometimes; you may take risks for yourself, but when it’s your family who may be butchered, decisions are harder. It’s not only the unoccupied who find judgments difficult. As Ian Buruma demonstrates in his informed and perceptive commentary, it can be equally difficult for those who were there.

Experts in urban fauna have apparently discovered a ‘sacred triangle’ between the Parc Monceau and Neuilly in the west of Paris. A short distance from the wind-blasted northern arrondissements with their ‘robust but primitive population’, the leafy avenues and eco-landscaped gardens of private mansions on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne have created a special microclimate. Here, a protected human species has found its natural habitat and breeding ground. Avaricious, nepotistic and practically inexterminable, it has caused death and suffering on an unimaginable scale while amassing wealth which far exceeds its natural needs.

Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is Fassbinder himself.’ ‘Fassbinder wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. He wanted to walk down a staircase wearing feathers and a gown’ It was the meeting of opposites. She was Hollywood royalty, Henry’s daughter, sexy star of Barbarella and double Oscar winner, poised to release the first of her series of workout videos that would in the next 13 years sell 17 million copies. By contrast, Fassbinder probably didn’t even own a pair of leg-warmers.

Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since he tried to be Ingmar Bergman. Perhaps that is a joke, or at least a rebuke. American Jewish comedians are so, well, Jewish. It’s pleasing to praise them for their more self-hating work. The Producers is proof of joy – with an overarching, exquisite Jewish joke: Jews fail at failure Now Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, has written a piece of criticism as elegant and sympathetic as Brooks is vulgar and savage.

The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages. Many of the characters then weave in and out of other chapters. As the book unfolds there are more and more back-references, adding to what we think we know about the characters, but also contributing to a sense of uncertainty that runs through the book. It begins simply enough. We meet an elderly couple, Dora Frenhofer, a novelist, and her partner Barry. Dora will become the central character. Her memory is going, and, worse still, her career as an author is coming to an end. ‘She talks of writing another novel. There will be none.

The year is 2011, and in Lviv, a city straddling the East and the West, ‘no fog had been thick enough to impede the last 20 years of Ukrainian capitalism’. On the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, a group of ageing hippies perform a bizarre ritual by a grave marked with his name. Alik and his friends, who have been gathering here since the 1970s to worship the musician, are now living in ‘a “double” past: another age and another country’. They know ‘time can’t be rewound like an old VHS tape’, and yet Alik keeps reminiscing about their Soviet days – a time when, despite everything, the whole town could hear their ‘strange music that the regional party committee didn’t recognise, with strange but, thank God, incomprehensible foreign lyrics’.