Novelist Naomi Alderman: ‘When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence’

As her hit feminist novel, The Power, becomes a TV series, the writer talks about dark episodes in her past that underpin her work, and how she is inspired by a new generation of women

Karl Geary: ‘I was writing out of confusion and horror, rage and love’

The actor turned novelist on creating authentic working-class characters, swapping Dublin for New York aged 16, and why sewing is like writing

Diana Evans: ‘The Tory rhetoric asks us to forget, I’m trying to make sure that we don’t’

Five years on from her acclaimed novel Ordinary People, the writer returns to explore the lives of black British Londoners. She talks about Grenfell, belonging – and how she writes to bear witness

‘A billion listens? Is that a lot?’ John Cooper Clarke on penning possibly the world’s favourite poem

I Wanna Be Yours, a love poem that rhymes Ford Cortina with vacuum cleaner, has been a school text and a wedding staple. But now, thanks to TikTok and Arctic Monkeys, it has gone spectacularly global. So who was it written for?

Matthew Desmond: ‘The poverty rate in America and the UK should be zero – and I think we can get there’

For the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Evicted, a heartbreaking study of the American housing crisis, bearing witness was not enough

Mary Beard: ‘Everyone is policing everything, and the left are just as bad as the right’

The classicist on life on the culture wars’ frontline, what she owes her mother – and how pizza shaped her TV career

Richard Milward: ‘I hid my writing like a secret vice’

The novelist on his latest book, a Charles Manson-inspired work written in slang, his love of the band Mogwai and the trials of sorting post for Royal Mail

David Baddiel: ‘Football fills a God-shaped hole’

Ahead of a new book about our need for faith, the ‘militant atheist’ discusses oversharing, identity – and why he’s distancing himself from Richard Dawkins

Sam Neill on his new memoir and living with blood cancer: ‘I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me’

The New Zealand actor’s new memoir reveals that he has been ‘crook’ with blood cancer and will need chemo for the rest of his life. But relaxing on his farm, he is philosophical. ‘Dying? I couldn’t care less,’ he says

Andrea Leadsom: ‘I was determined to become prime minister and deliver Brexit myself’

The Conservative MP and arch-leaver discusses the upside of life outside the EU, serpents in Westminster and the interview that sank her leadership bid

Margaret Atwood: ‘It would be fun to talk to Simone de Beauvoir’

The author on being banned in Virginia, communicating with dead writers and her new short story collection, the first since the death of her partner

‘She helped define what a first lady does’: Edith Wilson’s complex legacy

A new book paints President Woodrow Wilson’s wife as a complicated change-maker who refused to blend into the background

‘In the stillness, my mind was able to wander’: how a museum guard found solace in art

After a tragedy, Patrick Bringley swapped his glitzy magazine job to work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The experience was so profound, he wrote a book about it

Melvyn Bragg: ‘At 83, time goes round too quickly’

The broadcaster and writer on revisiting childhood for his nostalgic memoir, the genius of George Orwell, and his love of dancing

Who made you king of everything? Angela Saini on the origins of patriarchy

The journalist has written acclaimed books tackling race science and gender inequality. Next up, the patriarchy – which is neither natural nor inevitable, she argues