* "When Joyce Carol Oates was 14, growing up poor in rural New York, someone gave her a typewriter, and since then there has been no stopping her." Lewis Jones complains in The Daily Telegraph that 30 novels, 24 short story collections and other works--adding up to about a hundred--is a bit much in our "age of minimalism". But why must prolific equal bad? We won't even mention Dumas, but how about Compton Mackenzie, Ford Madox Ford, Georges Simenon and company...

Living in a time when we’re awestruck by jargon and terrorized by academic prose, when obscurity poses as profundity, when the idea of the concrete and the real has been etherized into discursivity and discursiveness, it is worth remembering and reading Ramanujan as the Absolute Other of the average American academic and her Indian apes." Rukun Advani remembers A K Ramanujan in the tenth year of his death.

More from the Lest We Forget section: Shashi Tharoor on Malcolm Muggeridge. "...if he was famously contrarian, it was in the service of a larger cause — the preservation of a society in which 'everything should be subject to criticism', authority was always suspect, and conformism was to be avoided."

Humphrey Hawksley likes blowing up India; it was Bombay in his previous novel, and it's Delhi, followed by most of India and Pakistan, in The Third World War. This little quirk aside, Hawksley appears to be an entertaining hack among thriller writers, something of a one-trick pony who's served up the Doomsday scenario three different ways in his last three books. Outlook's review takes him seriously; Business Standard complains that he creates inadvertent comedy as opposed to black comedy; and Ashok Malik at the Indian Express lets rip. "That Indian ‘commentators’ have written turgid appraisals of The Third World War speaks for both their self-esteem and sense of literature. If this book had been about Venezuela and Brazil would anybody have paid attention? Is publicity dependent on a book’s quality — or simply on how often it mentions India?"

"That left me wondering, however, what function religion fulfills, and why it appeals to so many people I suspect that it has to do with the human brain; what my late husband Heinz called 'the lizard brain.' We still dream when we sleep—much as people did thousands and millions of years ago. Our brain associates feelings and images and makes up 'story lines' that pervade our unconscious, and powerfully affect our sense of power and meaning. This kind of experience gives rise to religious tradition, and responds to the images, the music, the worship, and the stories we know from ancient traditions." Elaine Pagels, author of Beyond Belief (NB: if you're wondering, she has a completely different perspective on religion than a certain V S Naipaul, who wrote a similarly-titled book about his travels in the world of Islam) on the politics of Christianity.

After reading Pradeep Sebastian on bibliokleptomania, the Babu realises that he is one of the worst offenders among that tribe. Sebastian doesn't provide different grades of book thieves, but the Babu is clearly the Biblioklept Adeptus Absentus, who gets away with his many thefts under the guise of apparent absent-mindedness. For some odd reason, however, the Babu's light-fingeredness has never been exercised in bookstores and libraries--he strikes only among friends and relatives, or in other words, nearest and dearest who may suspect his dark secret, but are constrained by familial love never to speak a word of the gaps in their bookshelves.