We all know what goes on in advertising agencies. They are full of executives wearing interesting eyewear in open-plan offices, playing table tennis, drinking mojitos, having barbecues, and occasionally coming up with killer ideas before going off on skiing holidays.

Is this a true picture?

Lewis Wolpert likes to keep busy. His latest book, You're Looking Very Well, has just been published and he is already working on the next one. In breaks from writing, he goes running, plays tennis once or twice a week, cycles and has a busy social life - in other words he enjoys an enviably active lifestyle. Nothing remarkable about that, except that Wolpert is 81 years old.

When conducting an interview with someone who has just written a book or a play, or embarked on a new venture, the natural starting point is ask where the idea came from.

However, in the case of American author and neuroscientist David Eagleman I know in advance what his answer will be - that he does not have a clue.

There are several measures of success for a stand-up comedian. Traditionally, you knew you had arrived when you got through a set without anyone in the audience throwing objects at you. There are other landmarks - the first sell-out tour, the TV series, the DVD.

The internet has revolutionised our lives in any number of ways. But aside from social networking, Google Earth and YouTube, there has been one significant growth area. People have always been interested in where their families came from but the advent of the web means this current generation are able trace their ancestry at the click of a mouse.

Ada Yonath is in demand. People come from far and wide to hear her speak, she has been the subject of many an interview, and the media have camped outside her daughter's home. Her shock of grey, curly hair is now well known in Israel, and the great and the good have queued up to praise her.

Here is a quiz question for you. Who is Britain's foremost expert on trivia? The answer, almost certainly, is Mitchell Symons. Although such things are hard to quantify, Symons has written a string of bestselling books packed with interesting, weird and occasionally gross facts about everything from sex to travel to the toilet habits of the Inuit people.

Gary Shteyngart is having great difficulty dealing with a problem he never thought he would encounter.

Sandra Bernhard is a very serious comedian - in all senses of the word. She has been performing live for over 30 years now, in a career which has featured stand-up TV (notably on the Roseanne show), movies, music and a highly publicised friendship with Madonna. But she is not one to take comedy lightly. Her demeanour is severe, her body is thin and angular and her manner is all sharp edges. There are no flip comments, no asides, no jokes. These are clearly reserved for the stage.

Historians like nothing better than to nail a myth. Dan Plesch is confident that he has managed to refute two fairly major misconceptions about the Second World War. The first is that the United Nations was a creation of the post-war world, and the second is that, for all the suspicions that the Nazis were murdering Jews in Eastern Europe, this was never formally acknowledged by the Allied powers.