There is a wave of praise building for The World Is What It Is, the authorized Life of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. When the book first appeared, the emphasis in newspaper reports was wholly on the sadism of the novelist towards the women in his world. As the dust has settled over that, the mood has changed. Our critic A. N. Wilson calls it a “prodigious achievement, a justification for the art of biography itself”. Like Evelyn Waugh, Wilson writes, it was V. S. Naipaul’s “own self-protective decision to turn himself into a monster”, and in this book he does not come out too badly, “certainly not in the same league of monstrosity as, say, Nabokov or Tolstoy”.

The psychoanalyst Dr Karl Krueger boasted of a patient on whose level of monstrosity almost everyone ought to have been able to agree. To read his 1941 book Inside Hitler one still requires a British Library chaperone, as Daniel Pick describes, in his review of The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, psychoanalysis and the rise of fundamentalism. It is a shame perhaps that Krueger’s howling sharks and headless girls were a fiction. What if Freud himself had seen the idle painter and “street rat” in Vienna in 1909?

The distinguished critic David Daiches was a Jewish Scot who always “rejoiced in his double identity”, writes Margaret Drabble, recalling her days in Cambridge when she took tutorials with him in the late 1950s. Daiches described his return to England from America in 1951 as “an unfortunate career move”, but he undoubtedly won the admiration of his novelist pupil.

The work of the Cambridge critic and historian Stefan Collini is well known to TLS readers. Several of the essays in his collection Common Reading were first published here. Anyone who thinks that choosing our former editor, John Gross, to review the book is an “inside job” in the worst Grub Street tradition would be wise to read the piece first.

Peter Stothard

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now