honesty for Naipaul too often meant the untrammeled expression of extreme prejudice

Naipaul performs the sententious figure of caricature

one stentorian pronouncement follows another

it seems fatuous that so many reviews upheld him as a reliable witness to the convulsions of third worldism

Whatever the misprision, these writings were twinned for me

notions of individual responsibility and private entrepreneurship that were subsequently sacralized by the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s

the lugubrious interviewee America got to know from his films in the 1960s

He acquired the sobriquet “maverick” in the mid-’90s

The maverick was most appealing, paradoxically, when he issued a hoary ode to noble traditions, to the faith of his fathers, to the Senate, to the way it used to be — as if it ever was what it used be.