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“... went to get more wine from the cupboard downstairs, an after-dinner guest arrived. It was V.S. Naipaul. My father found him looking through the keyhole of the closed dining room door to see who else was at the table. We’re all looking through a keyhole of some kind now that Hugh is no longer alive. He kept the guest lists of all the people he and my ...”

“... but criticised what he called mimicry, not the colonial mimicry of the imperial centre that V.S. Naipaul wrote about and came to indulge in, but a faked-up recapitulation. ‘What happens in the Third World,’ Walcott declared, ‘is acceptance of the idea of history as a moral force. That notion is what paralyses and leads to mimicry of action.’ Or, more ...”

“... book he clearly and reasonably has South Africa in mind, and might have declared an interest if Naipaul had said much about that country. His business is quite simply to expose what he regards as the falsity of Naipaul’s position as a disinterested observer of, and expert on, the ‘Third World’, and the reason why he ...”

“... movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the 20th century’, that V.S. Naipaul spoke of in The Enigma of Arrival was, as Naipaul put it, ‘a movement between all the continents’. It could no longer be confined to a single paradigm (post-colonialism, internationalism, globalism, world ...”

“... diary of his teenage years shows. This journal, judiciously quoted in his memoir Rebecca’s Vest, had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent self-pity as the ...”

“... Nor did the unforgiving tone of his writing about the post-colonial condition: like V.S. Naipaul when he wrote about the Caribbean, Memmi seemed to flaunt his disappointment with, and estrangement from, the world he’d left behind.Yet Memmi’s decline also reflects a strength of his work: its refusal of consolations (among them inspirational ...”

“... Marvell as a lyric poet.We talk of Lamb’s ‘essays’, but this masks their formal range. V.S. Naipaul said that Lamb was one of the four 19th-century writers – the others being William Cobbett, William Hazlitt and Richard Jefferies – who gave him the most ‘novelistic pleasure’. Many of Lamb’s contributions as Elia read like short stories. In ...”

“... more ‘to stamp the idea of the repressed prudish man of God on the popular imagination’. V.S. Naipaul – who succeeded Greene – felt obliged to settle Maugham’s hash in Half a Life (2001). And even truly minor works like Christmas Holiday (1939) and The Magician (1908) are still in print, helping to keep the Royal Literary Society in funds. Those ...”

“... On 9 March 1951, Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later, Vidia, in a letter to the entire family, wrote: ‘I hope Pa does write, even five hundred words a day. He should begin a novel. He should realise that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one – one of phoney sophistication ...”

“... Israel, and perhaps between Israel and Jordan. The consequence would be the ‘recovery’ of a vast swatch of valuable Middle East territory for ‘Western’ power, which has become synonymous with US and Israeli domination. One sure thing to fall back on is what the American historian William Appleman Williams has called ‘empire as a way of ...”

“... to tell us the story of his pre-adolescent attempts at sex, as described in his memoir Rebecca’s Vest. He and his friends would make holes up in the wastes of Midlothian, pulling clods of dirt out and putting their wee wullies in for a bit of rubbing. ‘Yes,’ Karl said, weary at the idea of his comic proclivities. ‘That’s right. The earth didn’t ...”

“... is itself a reshaping of a post-colonial classic published nearly thirty years earlier. In V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh, exiled from the island of Isabella and living in a shabby London hotel, also finds control in setting things down: ‘Writing, for all its initial distortion, clarifies, and even becomes a process of life.’ The clarity ...”

“... umbrellas in Hyde Park. In his account of The Enigma of Arrival, Sandhu seems puzzled by V.S. Naipaul’s careful prose. This cold and elegant writer is never going to share his pleasure in life-giving urban confusion. It’s no surprise that Naipaul went to live in Wiltshire when his sentences are so neat: ‘His ...”

“... in which an angry, thwarted émigré returns home to Zanzibar, is very much in the vein of V.S. Naipaul’s brilliant and monstrous The Mimic Men (1967); though Gurnah doesn’t quite have Naipaul’s gift for lacerating elegance (few do). Gurnah can seem tentative or forced, not quite confident in his own voice, as if he ...”

“... a fuddy-duddy smack at Surrealism from the Czech-born Tom Stoppard. Michael Wood quotes V.S. Naipaul’s country-pub-landlord comments of 1951 on the passing of Oxford’s golden age, having just arrived in the place as a young-fogeyish 18-year-old: ‘Gone are the days of the aristocrats. Nearly everyone comes to Oxford on a state grant. The standard of ...”