If you were expecting a fusty, formal adaptation of Anthony Trollope – and one of his least known novels, to boot – Lady Anna: All At Sea will come as a breath of fresh air. Colin Blumenau’s production of Craig Baxter’s play, based loosely around the Trollope novel of the same name and commissioned by the Trollope Society to mark the bicentenary of the writer’s birth, speeds through its two-hour-plus run, keeping a nimble crew of seven on its toes and the audience engaged in its ludic conspiracies.

Polo played in surplus First World War tanks; zeppelin-shooting as a gentlemanly leisure pursuit; the mighty vessel RMS Tyrannic, proud host of the Grand Ballroom Chariot Race and so safe "that she carries no insurance". These are just some of Canadian satirical writer and artist Bruce McCall’s ingenious retro-futurist creations. Slyly merging meticulous realism and madcap fantasy, they depict – with parodic faux-nostalgia – a world that never quite existed in order to comment on the one that does.

From complex machines, whirring busily but with no useful function, to structures that allude to the fundamental building blocks of the universe, Conrad Shawcross (born 1977) uses sculpture to explore the big ideas of philosophy and science. A graduate of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and the Slade School of Art, he bacame the youngest living Royal Academician in 2013. This year – punctuated by a series of prestigious public sculptures – has been his busiest yet.

Helen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love may be set in 17^th century Mexico and follow the conflict between strict religion and personal development, but its theme of a woman denied her voice by a surrounding male hierarchy retains real contemporary relevance. First staged at the RSC three years ago, the dramatic strengths of the work shine through in this new Globe production, which reminds us most of all of Edmundson’s confident craft and limberness of language.

Quentin Blake, illustrator, cartoonist and children’s author, has, to date, illustrated over 300 books. He is most famously associated with Roald Dahl, but he’s worked with a number of children’s writers, most recently David Walliams, illustrating the actor's debut novel The Boy in the Dress. He is a patron of The Big Draw which aims to get people of all ages drawing throughout the UK, and of The Nightingale Project, a charity that puts art into hospitals. Since 2006, he's produced work for several hospitals and mental health centres in London and in France.

Artists can be selfish bastards. Yoko Ono didn’t pay her babysitters; Bob Dylan has frozen out nearly all his friends; Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, and William Burroughs shot his. Philp (Jason Schwartzman), the young novelist who sociopathically meanders through Alex Ross Perry’s new film, causes no fatalities. Which is where his positive qualities peter out. Whether contemplating his navel to Ph.D level, or harbouring petty grudges and explosive rages which would shame a two-year-old, Philip may be cinema’s most rampantly temperamental artist.

Margaret Atwood’s Forties childhood was spent knocking around the Canadian backwoods with her forest entomologist, proto-ecologist dad, and it shows. Interviewed alongside her husband Graeme Gibson on the Brighton Festival’s closing night, the international literary prizes, like the gushing reverence with which she’s introduced by Festival director Ali Smith and received by the sell-out crowd, seems to have made little impression. This is a modest, earthy, dryly witty and straight-talking couple, with the self-sufficient air of those familiar with isolated, country living.

On my way to the Woolf Works opening last night, I made the mistake of reading The Waves, Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel. It was a mistake because even the briefest immersion in Woolf’s prose was a thousand times more exhilarating than the 90 minutes of treacly sludge served up by Wayne McGregor and Max Richter in this, the choreographer’s much-hyped first full-length work for the Royal Ballet.

The Nobel prize-winning writer, playwright and artist Günter Grass was arguably the best-known German-language author of the second half of the 20th century. Kate Connolly met him in May 2010 in Istanbul where, after attending a series of literary events, Grass was forced to stay on for some days as volcanic ash closed European airports.

Born in 1927 in the port city of Danzig in what is now Gdansk in Poland, he was among the hundreds of thousands of ethnic German refugees who settled in West Germany in 1945. His literary career started with his debut novel, The Tin Drum (1959), which remains his most famous work. It formed the first part of his Danzig Trilogy and is steeped in European magic realism. The book was adapted for the screen by Volker Schlöndorff in 1979. Like many of his novels it deals with the rise of Nazism and the experience of war.

Alice is always with us; the most quoted work of literature, after the Bible and Shakespeare. In fact, Desert Island Discs should probably add Alice to the mandatory Bible and Shakespeare as an automatic inclusion for the survival kit.