* Tibor Fischer's on a roll. First he boasts about firing his agent, Andrew 'The Jackal' Wylie; then he disses Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, while managing to respect the publisher's embargo--if only by the skin of his grinning teeth. "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder (not only because of the embargo, but because someone might think I was enjoying what was on the page). It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

Louisa Young is the Old New J K Rowling. She and a dozen others.

Bradford loses her suit. The Babu thinks she may have got a slightly raw deal; on the other hand, knowing how the industry uses "inspiration", you'd never be able to tell if they'd plagiarised. In a Bollywood rendering of Lolita, for instance, this is how the scenario would play out.

Humbert Humbert dances around trees with Dolores while watching an adorable Lolita, played by an overweight, pert brat, grow up. In disturbing dream sequences, the audience sees a grown-up Lolita, played by an overweight, pert actress, dancing around trees with Humbert Humbert. Then a flashback will reveal that Humbert Humbert's long-lost twin brother, Himbert Himbert, had gone to the bad, seduced Dolores' cousin sister and died, but not before marrying her in a fit of remorse and producing a son, Hambert Hambert. Lolita and Hambert Hambert meet when some goons attempt to kidnap her by helicopter and take her off to a dark warehouse in order to have their wicked way(s) with her. In between dance sequences, in which the audience realises it was actually he and not Humbert Humbert prancing around the shrubbery, Hambert Hambert will follow them on a horse, kick the door of the warehouse open, deliver a stirring speech and kill seventeen assorted baddies armed only with a knife. (Him, not the baddies. The baddies are armed with Kalashnikovs, grenades and Japanese katanas.) He and Lolita fall in love but realise It Can Never Be because they are of the same blood.

Just as Lolita, distraught, prepares to marry Humbert Humbert's business associate's scheming son (who was responsible for the helicopter kidnap, but no one knows that, except for Lolita's pet dog, who urinates comically on his leg every time he comes to the house), Dolores' cousin sister will die of a broken heart, in a touching deathbed sequence where she hands Hambert Hambert a locket. The locket contains the secret of his birth: he is not the son of Himbert Himbert at all, nor even hers (she is Fallen But Virtuous, it turns out), but the son of an old friend of hers who appears every now and then in between song sequences as a mysterious godwoman who blesses everyone and cries a lot. (She is dying of cancer, too, just to tidy up the loose ends.)

Because of a distant--very distant--family connection, Humbert Humbert and Hambert Hambert appear to look like each other, but it's too distant to matter. In a final sequence, just before the marriage vows are pronounced, Hambert Hambert will discover the truth from the lips of his real (but dying all the same) mother and parachute through the roof of the pandal in order to say, "Yeh shaadi nahin hoga! (Subtitle: This marriage will not happen!") There is another shootout, but Lolita's dog urinates on the villainous son's leg at just the right time and slipping, he loses the battle. As Humbert Humbert and Dolores look on, misty-eyed, the pundit re-emerges from behind the balustrade where he has sheltered during the shootout, and the wedding starts up again, uniting Hambert Hambert and Lolita. In the climax, the pundit pulls off his fake beard to reveal that he is, really, Himbert Himbert, having survived all these years but hidden his identity for fear of causing his family distress. Because of a vow made to Hambert Hambert's father, his closest friend, he had long since been shadowing the happy couple. Even during the song sequences. The dog yaps happily in time with the catchy wedding number, someone mercifully strangles the damn thing, and everyone goes home happy with the Russian genius who produced a work as ripely entertaining as Lolita.