US Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Jordan on Thursday for talks with key regional ally King Abdullah II on a Middle East peace process marred by Israel's announcement of more settlement plans for east Jerusalem.

"He will inform the king about his talks in Israel and the Palestinian territories," said a senior official, who added that Biden headed immediately from the airport to the meeting.

"The king will express to Biden his frustration over Israel's new settlements plans, which undermine peace efforts."

At the Finborough, Anders Lustgarten's A Day at the Racists is the best new political play of recent times. It reflects uncomfortable realities - not only about why people vote for the BNP, but how the white working-class has been betrayed by the Left.

Remember the misplaced self-congratulation that followed the BBC Question Time with Nick Griffin' The BNP leader's fellow panellists took easy pot shots at him, but failed to address the reason why he attracts votes.

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Two new plays about the BNP opened this week and with them so did the old debate about whether any play ever changed anything.

"No play in the whole of history, in all the countries of the world, has ever changed a policy of the world," said wise old Peter Brook recently. The director is probably right. But what plays can change is attitudes, as long as it is not obvious that changing attitudes is what the playwright set out to do. This proves to be the Achilles heel of Philip Ridley's Moonfleece which boldly combines the poetical with the political.

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I had a sense of what to expect from Green Zone because I had seen director Paul Greengrass's 2002 Bloody Sunday as well as his Bourne films. In Greengrass's version of the 1972 incident in Ulster, he implies that the killings were a deliberate massacre by the British Army - even inventing a sinister posh-voiced general who tells the Paras it is time to teach the Fenians a lesson.

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The menu in the restaurant where Jonathan Safran Foer and I are due to meet in five minutes' time is causing me some anxiety. It appears to offer one vegetarian dish and 600 meat dishes, none of them remotely organic.

This menu is a symbol of everything Safran Foer deplores. It epitomises what he thinks is wrong with modern food consumption and production, a subject he has spent the past three years researching, and has just travelled half-way round the world to publicise. This menu is a certain red rag to the raging bull that is, or will be any second now, Jonathan Safran Foer.

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By David Eagleman
Canongate, £9.99

Orthodox Jews believe in the afterlife. Aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins do not. In the middle is David Eagleman, who says: "both seem to have complete certainty about things they can't possibly be certain about." A neuroscientist by day, Eagleman has spent his evenings concocting scenarios of what Heaven might look like and who (or what) will be the Deity who welcomes us.

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Take a mournful shlemiel from Austria. Drop him in Venezuela where he has gone to collect an inheritance from his uncle, a Jewish refugee from Hamburg, start a violent coup and stir in a cast of vivid characters, shysters, swindlers, lawyers and even a wonder-rabbi, and then you get a sense of The Inheritance (Pushkin Press, £10) by Peter Stephan Jungk, published in German a decade ago, and now superbly translated by Michael Hofmann.

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At the age of 106, the concert pianist Alice Sommer Herz is an international celebrity. But despite playing in front of audiences all over the world, perhaps what is most remarkable about her life is her continued capacity for hope in the face of unimaginable suffering.

In 1943, with her husband and their six-year-old son, she was deported from Prague to the Nazis' "model" concentration camp at Terezin; her music helped to sustain her spirit there and throughout her astonishing life.

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Irving Penn's career lasted 60 years. But his photographs will last forever.

The National Portrait Gallery is currently showing Penn's
pictures commissioned by Vogue magazine from 1947-2007. Given the ephemeral nature of magazines, it is a mark of distinction that his photographs are still as fresh and moving as they were the day they were taken. (How many pictures from this week's Hello! do you think will be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2070?)

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Jordan's King Abdullah II will discuss arms contracts and the Middle East peace process with Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev Thursday, news agencies reported.

"The situation in the Middle East will become one of the key issues to be discussed in the Kremlin," Medvedev's press service said ahead of the talks with Abdullah, who arrived in Moscow Wednesday.

"The two sides will consider the situation as the Palestinian and Israeli leaders agreed on indirect talks and the League of Arab States decided to support this kind of contacts for four months," the press service said.

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