Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Naipaul is an English prose stylist of the old school. While his books are sometimes structurally very complicated, his sentences are inevitably models of clarity, directness and unobtrusive power. "More and more today," though, as Naipaul has put it, "writers' myths are about the writers themselves"; and much of his authority as an interpreter of the post-colonial world derives from the vexed relationship to the colonial past inherent in his background and family history.

-- From Christopher Taylor's review of Literary Occasions, published last week in the Telegraph.