Sophie Elmhirst

On one of my first meetings with Philip Pullman, he led me to the crenelated tower of Exeter College, in Oxford, and pointed out the room he lived in as a student. More than 50 feet up from the ground was a tiny attic window. To visit friends living in rooms on the adjacent staircase — accessible only at ground level — Pullman, a tall, sturdy man with a head like a boulder, would clamber out his window, shimmy along a gutter and propel himself through a window into a bathroom. From where we were standing, the feat looked unlikely, and unwise. Pullman was self-deprecating. “It was less precarious than it seems because it’s actually quite a large gutter, and it’s quite deep,” he said. “And I was drunk. So.”

The Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, on Hampstead Heath, a patch of wilderness in North London, is surrounded by trees and populated by ducks. Regulars bathe year-round, breaking the ice with their toes in midwinter. On a surprisingly hot September afternoon, the British film director Andrea Arnold lowered herself into the water. She’d driven from the other side of the city, where she lives in Greenwich with her daughter, for a cold plunge. As she swam, she kept veering off the conventional counterclockwise course around the edge of the pond to try to get nose to nose with one of the passing mallards. One let her float up close, almost touching, before scooting across the water.

The dress code of the clientele in Planet Organic, Notting Hill is gym chic. On a hot day in mid-August, the men wore mid-thigh shorts, pectoral-enhancing vests, neon Nikes; the women were in black leggings and intricate ensembles of sports bras and cross-strapped Lycra. They had all either just worked out, were about to work out, or wanted to look as if working out was a constant possibility.

1. Paris, late June, and le Jardin du Luxembourg is overspilling with tennis players and pushchairs and ice-cream-coated small children in various stages of euphoria and collapse. Among them are two belonging to the author Zadie Smith - Kit and Harvey, a girl and a boy, six and three - who are in the playground in the middle of a truce negotiation with their mother, identifiable from across the gardens by the bright red wrap tied around her hair. A babysitter, hired for a few hours each day, hovers. Zadie has to work; the children don't want her to go. The everlasting debate.

Not long after arriving in New York, fresh off the London boat, our hero Robert Smith goes to church. In 1746, the town is still in miniature, populated by a mere “six thousand souls”, many of whom are also saying their prayers. The scene allows author Francis Spufford to lay out his wares, presenting a dissection of New York society taking their places in the pews, from the Governor and his two African footmen “with wigs powdered to the colour of icing sugar”, to “a choir of blue-coated orphans

The feeling of despair that descends on hearing the theme tune of the CBeebies television show Me Too! is unmistakable. At 6am, it is the first show on the schedule of the BBC’s dedicated channel for the under-sixes, and if you find yourself watching it, a series of bleak assumptions can be made. First, you’re up too early. Second, you’ve capitulated, turning on the TV in the hope of silencing your offspring and going back to sleep. Third, even if you do manage to lose consciousness again, your

A photograph of Aaron Collis regularly appeared in the press while he was on trial. It showed a young man in a crowd of friends, whose faces have been pixelated to preserve their anonymity, and it appears to capture a moment of celebration. The group are bunched together, arms in the air, all wearing the same white shirts and roughly knotted blue-and-red striped ties. They could be in school uniform, or party costume. Collis is looking up at the camera, a wide smile exposing a top row of pointed

On a cool winter evening, Robin Wright takes a seat at a corner table in her local New York bar, orders a glass of full-bodied red and exhales. "It has been a long week." Wright doesn't look tired – she has the kind of internally illuminated, Californian complexion that makes you doubt if such a state were possible. And there are reasons to celebrate. That morning

The temperature drops by 50C over the course of Jenni Fagan’s new novel. The Sunlight Pilgrims begins, in the autumn of 2020, at a chilling minus six, and by late March and the end of the book has descended to an unsurvivable minus 56C. There’s a giant iceberg looming off the coast of Scotland, schools have closed and people are freezing to death in their homes and their cars, lost in snowdrifts that rise up above windows. This is climate change made palpably, physically real: not a policy issue

Once, love stories led up to a ring. Elizabeth McKenzie’s new novel begins with one: “a diamond so large it would be a pill to avoid for those who easily gag”. The metaphor speaks for itself. Veblen Amundsen-Hovda, who has just been proposed to by her boyfriend Paul Vreeland, has mixed feelings about marriage. Veblen, named by her impossible and hypochondriac mother Melanie after the anti-consumerist 19th-century philosopher Thorstein Veblen, is as unconventional as her name suggests. She is a