Marking the death this month of the great science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, here is an interview I did with him back in the early 90s.

Last month, East Hampshire District Council approved an outline planning application from government regeneration quango the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) for a 500-home development at a former Ministry of Defence barracks at Whitehill and Bordon in Hampshire.

Peter Rollins is huddled in his car, somewhere in New York, talking to me on his mobile. It’s the morning after a late-night engine breakdown that stopped him returning to his base (and landline) in Connecticut. Not the most conducive setting for our interview, I am thinking – but soon enough, I forget we are not sitting in the same room.

What began in 1994 with the launch of a single ethically-produced and sold chocolate bar, has mushroomed into 7,000 products carrying the Fairtrade Mark today. Two of the nation’s favourite chocolate bars – KitKat (four finger) and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk are Fairtrade. So are 30 per cent of our bananas and half the sugar we buy. Major supermarkets – the Co-op, M&S, Morrisons, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s – have committed entire product lines to Fairtrade. All Olympic venues during the 2012 London Games will be selling Fairtrade refreshments. Harriet Lamb was there from the start.

In 1995, Henry Olonga became the first black cricketer ever to play for Zimbabwe and, at 18, the youngest to do so. But, while these feats have secured him a place in world sporting history, he is better known for an event on the pitch that had little to do with his notoriously unpredictable fast-bowling action.

A few short years ago, William Paul Young was an odd-job man working, among other things, as a janitor for a friend’s business and struggling to pay the rent on his small house in Oregon, US. One self-published novel later, he has turned into a world-famous and very wealthy author. Meeting with Young in a hotel in London, part way through his tour of Europe, I find it difficult to put this thought to one side.

Writing in the Times shortly after the publication of Marilynne Robinson’s third novel in 2008, Brian Appleyard opined: “I’m not saying you’re actually dead if you haven’t read Marilynne Robinson, but I honestly couldn’t say you’re fully alive.”

On a grey but close day, with no windows open, the low-ceilinged lobby outside Robert Beckford’s office at Goldsmith’s College in London – at the top of what feels like a high-rise portacabin – can leave one feeling a little claustrophic. The lift is small and tinny, the main reception for the college is more like a school caretaker’s office. Things are on the scruffy side, which works for Goldsmith’s College, Beckford says as he ushers us into his only marginally more airy quarters.

Anjum Anwar is sitting at the wheel of her car, cursing the mid-morning traffic. Our interview at a local hotel has overrun and we are late for a seminar she has arranged for some students at Blackburn College – to be led by the prominent liberal Muslim academic Dr Irfan Al-Alawi.

The vote that was to deny Ann Widdecombe her last-minute pre-retirement ambition of winning the speaker’s chair was just under a week away when we arrived at her Westminster offices. Huddled over desks with her staff she was planning a frantic day of signature-gathering to support a campaign that appeared to be gaining momentum.

Two pieces of John Humphrys’ work stand out from among the accolades and awards adorning his long years as a British broadcasting institution. He has fronted the BBC’s highest profile TV and radio programmes – including six years on the nine o’clock news in the 80s, and 22 years this year presenting Today on Radio 4. He is also the author of six books and a great many newspaper articles. But two projects have elicited outpourings of feedback from listeners and readers, quite beyond compare to anything else he has done.

UNAIDS executive director Dr Peter Piot believes trade unions will have a critical role to play in the global response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic for the next 25 years and beyond, as Kay Parris reports