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“... and finally the elderly relative you have to brace yourself for at Christmas. She admires V.S. Naipaul. She finds Toni Morrison ‘politically correct’. She believes the French language ‘was forged for me alone’. She has, she admits, ‘a provocative side I can’t get rid of, unlike the right-minded people who see the world as a reality they can ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nuance of it regardless. She is much better on the other emotional aspects of migration. V.S. Naipaul leaves Trinidad for England in 1950, and as the plane takes off, sees the whole ‘landscape of my childhood’ for the first time, exhilaration and regret running through him. For others leaving the Caribbean, the long sea voyage to Britain arouses ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cupboard and said: ‘Will you just have a look at these, they’re by a West Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul’, I read them and wrote Diana a report in which I said: ‘I know we never do short stories, but we must do these, they are incredibly good.’ Then he turned up at the office with the beginning of his first novel, so, typically, they didn’t print his ...”

“... 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 ...”