Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

A few questions I ask myself almost every day:

"What does a gifted, ambitious person from a place like Trinidad do with his life? What are the options, and how ethical, satisfactory, lasting, and culturally valuable are they? Is such a person fated to end his life in exile, a lonely émigré?"

— From "Civilisation and V.S. Naipaul", an essay by Bruce Bawer in the Autumn 2002 Hudson Review. Bawer writes a decent summary, with no particularly original insights, of Naipaul's work & themes, declaring him "someone whose entire body of work might justifiably be described as a defense of civilisation".