“... 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 ...”

“... writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practises in A House for Mr Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives, or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr Biswas lived six years at The Chase, years so squashed ...”

“... gender and class, before settling into detailed analyses of work by Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh is Khair’s anti-Rushdie (‘Rushdie continues to write with only a fractional awareness of the complexities of alienation’), a sort of demystified, theoretically alert version of Narayan or ...”

“... the fatwa was announced. He was told about it that evening and spotted an opportunity.When V.S. Naipaul visited Tehran in August 1979, six months after the Islamic Revolution, he found himself on the set of a dystopian movie. Billboards advertised non-existent commodities, fancy restaurants didn’t have a single customer, cranes hung idle beside unfinished ...”

“... manage to attract the highest accolade: ‘Enjoyable’. In Journals 1990-92 we learn that V.S. Naipaul met John Major shortly after he had been elected PM, and found him ‘quick and dazzling’ (‘not the sort of praise Vidia gives to everyone’); we learn that Powell’s favourite-ever film was Stroheim’s Foolish Wives; and that Jilly Cooper turned ...”

“... into reactionary self-bowdlerisation. For them American power is sacrosanct. In the 1960s V.S. Naipaul began, disquietingly, to systematise the revisionist view of empire. A disciple and wilful misreader of Conrad, he gave Third Worldism, as it came to be known in France and elsewhere, a bad name. He didn’t deny that terrible things had happened in such ...”

“... for promotion.’ The system still flourishes behind the façade of modern bureaucracy; and the vast expansion of the salariat, which feeds off foreign aid, merely exacerbates the tendency. ‘Though it will be commonly denied, today chakari remains a solid fact of social life, and is evident at all levels of government.’ It is a way for information to ...”

“... owed their careers to him and his encouragement. It seemed that he could get anyone to write: V.S. Naipaul, whose first books had been published through Francis, was commissioned by him to do some of his best work there – pieces which later turned into books. Gore Vidal, also an admirer of Wyndham, was a frequent contributor. Bruce Chatwin was persuaded by ...”

“... and, with it, the tiers-mondisme which in time became associated with a kultur-kampf when V.S. Naipaul, Pascal Bruckner (The Tears of the White Man), Conor Cruise O’Brien and others withdrew their earlier support for national liberation movements and what was once the Non-Aligned Movement. The other subject she doesn’t fully broach is directly entailed ...”

“... instance, are Pakistani. Others Bangladeshi. Others West, or East, or even South African. And V.S. Naipaul, by now, is something else entirely. This word ‘Indian’ is getting to be a pretty scattered concept. Indian writers in England include political exiles, first-generation migrants, affluent expatriates whose residence here is frequently ...”

“... from haemorrhagic fever – a few days in Kinshasa, but mostly way north in Kisangani, where V.S. Naipaul set his cruel little book, A Bend in the River – and away from Britain long enough to miss the arrival of Outbreak, the Dustin Hoffman film. Helping out on a documentary about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I could carry my creature comforts with me, in ...”

“... like an upright feature of a catacomb. Or, beaky and bony, like a prehistoric bird, a giant moa, a vast, flesh-coloured sparrow.’ Some of the repetitive quality is necessary and even purposeful, corresponding to the emotionally frozen state of the family, its humiliated stasis. The word ‘Mother’ hasn’t been used so often, with a consistently negative ...”

“... of books me see in Rikers. One of them is this book Middle Passage. Some coolie write it, V.S. Naipaul. Brethren, the man say West Kingston is a place so fucking bad that you can’t even take a picture of it, because the beauty of the photographic process lies to you as to just how ugly it really is. Oh you read it? Trust me, even him have it wrong. The ...”

“... 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 ...”