A new film, Expelled, claims to show that academics sympathetic to the theory of intelligent design have suffered at the hands of the scientific establishment. At a queue for a test screening, a security guard picked out P.Z. Myers, an evolutionary biologist, and barred him. But the guard overlooked Dr Myers's guest: the somewhat better-known Richard Dawkins.

***

Official recognition as the oddest book title of the year as selected by The Bookseller has gone to If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs. The author, sticking to the spirit of the competition, is called Big Boom.

***

There have been four Indian or India-born Booker Prize winners, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, but no Indian judges. Next year, there will be one - but judging the Man Booker International Prize for “achievement in fiction”. Amit Chaudhuri will join Jane Smiley and Andrey Kurkov.

***

Bret Easton Ellis is in a “lost period”, he tells the Los Angeles Times. He has been “mostly writing scripts for films that have not been made”, and is working on a sequel to his first novel, Less Than Zero.

***

Yours for $13,770 (about £6,900): a Royal typewriter from the Cuba home of Ernest Hemingway - or, as Circa Savannah, the retailer, styles him “Ernest Hemington”.

***

The death of Arthur C. Clarke has brought to light a correspondence with George Bernard Shaw. In 1947 Clarke sent the playwright the British Interplanetary Society journal that contained Clarke's essay, The Challenge of the Spaceship. Shaw said that he would like to join the Society, adding theories about the crash of a test flight. Clarke replied to correct Shaw's “hopeless confusion”.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy