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“... brilliant writing, they tend to occur in essays on the authors he most respects, in this case V.S. Naipaul. Normally he protects his health and virtue by ranging as far as possible from adverbial conventionality. I made a list of recherché adverbs, of which this is a selection: ‘beamingly upbeat’, ‘lurchingly written’, ‘deeply ...”

“... fits of journalism is probably the writer’s sense that something must be done to suggest the vast vague context in which all the holding-together is to take place; they are unwelcome emanations of the Zeitgeist. However, once those visitations are over all goes more smoothly. We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted ...”

“... contemporary master writing at the height of his powers’. Precisely. I sometimes think that V.S. Naipaul is probably the last master of classical English prose. The sobering fact is that many of the energetic novelists writing in English from ‘abroad’ seem more inventive in their ways with plot, narrative, character and the rest of the traditional ...”

“... unconventional’ and possibly even a ‘sentimental whim’. The novel, according to V.S. Naipaul, ‘is a form of social inquiry’. It’s a nice idea, the novelist as a sort of Leveson figure, calling witnesses and taking submissions from learned counsel, and The Children Act cleaves to it more literally than most. It offers chewy ...”

“... of an admired author as undeserving of the fullest canonical attention. It so happens that another vast collection of what Max Müller might have called chips from a writer’s workshop has appeared at more or less at the same moment as this one.* It is equally scrupulous though perhaps less arduously discursive. Jeffrey Heath’s collection, animated ...”

“... Naipaul’s grandfather, a Hindu of the Brahmin caste, left India to work as an indentured labourer in the West Indies. In 1962, Naipaul went to India for a year’s stay which became a book, entitled An Area of Darkness. The title refers to what the country had been for him in his West Indian Hindu enclave ...”

“... in May. The Central Vista, the axis of the British imperial capital, was being reconstructed at vast expense. The exhibition complex across the street from the Purana Qila had been razed and rebuilt as the venue for the 2023 G20 Summit. As the climax of India’s tenure as host nation, September’s meeting of heads of state was presented to Indians as the ...”

“... might defend ethically noxious artistic representations in the interests of the imagination. V.S. Naipaul writes admiringly of Trollope’s prejudices, not because they are morally justifiable, but because they belong to his imaginative energy and clarity. ‘I wonder whether anyone anywhere will ever be able again to write with his Mid-Victorian certainty ...”

“... Perhaps Bissoondath will have been warned not to expect too much attention by his uncle, V.S. Naipaul. A Casual Brutality is narrated by Dr Raj Ramsingh, an Indian from the Caribbean island of Casquemada, who has returned home after qualifying in Toronto. He brings with him his wife Jan – who rapidly starts to dislike the island and the extended-family ...”

“... for the money, as he frankly admitted, like Amis in Nashville and Wilson in Iowa and like V.S. Naipaul, who hated having to teach creative writing in Uganda but was still short of money. Jonathan Raban taught at Smith College in the early 1970s but loathed it. ‘Never again,’ he said, no matter the money. A number of writers, Anthony Thwaite among ...”

“... space as is the older England in time; ‘My Contemporaries’, from Ivy Compton-Burnett to V.S. Naipaul, where the richest, funniest and saddest anecdotes are to be found; and a short fourth section, ‘Proust and Proustian Matters’. In this section Powell’s interest in the social takes at one point the form of a rather dazzling disquisition on food in ...”

“... his liking. Tackling a major contemporary writer who seems to have settled for quietism – V.S. Naipaul – Rushdie attributes his ‘utter weariness’ to a withering of the heart. Imaginary Homelands is the self-portrait of a brash and quarrelsome writer who wants (and, I should say, deserves) to be loved. ‘Is nothing sacred?’ was his declaration of ...”

“... page. He may admire the spare aesthetic of postcolonial writers such as J.M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul, or of the grand old man of Kenyan letters, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, but what he refers to as their ‘stingy prose’ is also an index of what he is writing against. Their pained grappling with questions of conscience is not his natural mode. Though far from ...”

“... about at least one novelist who might be hospitably claimed as a modern British master – V.S. Naipaul, who is briefly referred to as ‘the Trinidadian novelist’. This might place him with such non-British writers as Nadine Gordimer and Patrick White, but he is later included in Bradbury’s alphabetical checklist of British novelists since 1876. It ...”

“... invited – and vigorously sustained – the inevitable comparisons with Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul. In Bodily Harm there was a political moral directed at Atwood’s immediate public, the ‘sweet Canadians’ with their readiness to come forward with food aid, tourist traffic and diplomatic support, for a newly-independent Commonwealth country, with ...”