Marianne Levy, 33

All my novels are essentially about falling in love and getting a house Well, that's what my husband told me a few years ago. It sounds like a very material view of the world but the house symbolises so much of where our fortunes are sited. For me, growing up, I always wanted a safe home, which was hard for my mother to provide after she was widowed and left with two children to raise on her own.

What do a pearly queen at the Harvest Festival and an Eton boy covered in mud from the school's Wall Game have in common? The answer, for James O Jenkins, is Britain's gloriously idiosyncratic customs.

Janet Suzman, 73

This year's Paralympics will be on a par with the Olympics Look at the T54 wheelchair record for 5,000m and you'll see it's almost three minutes faster than the able-bodied record; or look at the world number-one wheelchair tennis player Stéphane Houdet, who serves at 100mph. When people see performances like those they will start realising that it's a serious spectacle, and they will start respecting these performers as athletes.

Simon King, 45

My first book came about over a bet I had a drunken conversation with a friend about some day writing a book, and she said, "If you write me three chapters, I'll take you for dinner at your favourite restaurant." So I did [the resulting book, Ralph's Party, was the biggest-selling debut novel of 1999], and she made me send it out to agents. When one of those agents liked it and told me Penguin wanted to pay me £120,000 to write my first two books, I thought everyone had gone mad.

It was at a swimming pool in Weymouth that Norman Lomax first saw Sue Austin propelling herself through the water in an adapted wheelchair – and it was something of a eureka moment for him. "As a photographer," he explains, "the best stories are of ordinary people doing extraordinary things – that's what I saw here."

I've tried to find a scientific way of writing songs The brain really interests me, so I studied clinical neuroscience at Glasgow University [graduating in 2010, having been signed to EMI while studying]. I've discovered that while I don't think you really create a formula, analysing how people think can help [with songwriting].

Few of us have heard of ferrofluids. But, thanks to their magnetic properties, these oily liquids, packed with tiny iron particles, have a number of applications, from sealing computer hard-drives to enhancing medical imaging – and, more recently, their use as an art medium.