John is Easy to Please is a collection of six pieces written over a period of nine years for the New Yorker, where Mr Ved Mehta was a staff writer. These essays - the longest running to 58 pages, and the shortest to 10 pages, focussing on a variety of people, are unified by what Mr Mehta calls in his foreword 'the ancient theme of the tongue and the pen'. The brief foreword again suggests that these are accounts of his encounters with literate personages - George Sherry, UN interpreter; Sir William Haley, English editor and broadcaster; Sir Basil Blackwell, Oxford bookseller; Ram Babu Saksena, Urdu translator and critic, R K Narayan, Indian novelist and Noam Chomsky, American linguist. But it is more than that.