Wednesday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Daniel Finkelstein: Diana inquest: the right thing
• Alice Miles: The wobbly Russian doll at Number 10.
• Gerard Baker: Key to the Iraq debate is its unreality
• George Walden: Don't vote for London Mayor
• Matthew Syed: Olympic ideals- what nonsense
• Magnus Linklater: V. S. Naipaul- ignore his life

And from the rest of the papers...

• Jan Moir: (The Telegraph) - The shadow over Princess Diana's grave
• Irwin Stelzer: (The Telegraph) - Brown's lost vision of a great Britain
• Jeff Randall: (The Telegraph) - How Labour has wasted £1 trillion
• Jonathan Freedland: (The Guardian) - It is not a shift to the left to insist that entry to schools should be fair
• Glenn Patterson: (The Guardian) - A consensus on crowing
• Deborah Hargreaves: (The Guardian) - The credit crunch is about to get very personal
• Brian Paddick: (The Independent) - It's time to move hard-working illegals into society
• Mark Steel: (The Independent) - So did neolithic settlers have estate agents
• Hamish McRae: (The Independent) - Back to the world of proper saving and borrowing for homes, and the better for it
• Martin Wolf: (The Financial Times) - Don't blame Greenspan

And from around the world...

• Maureen Dowd: (The New York Times) - Iraq- toil and trouble
• Gene Russianoff: (The New York Times) - New York's abandoned congestion charge
• Joan Chen: (The Washington Post) - The Olympics should be a bridge for friendship, not a platform for politics
• Michael Zeldin: (The Wall Street Journal) - The problem with brand Hillary
• Philip Bowring: (International Herald Tribune) - Beware an angry China
• Brahma Chellaney: (Japan Times) - Contrasting reactions to crackdowns in Tibet and Burma

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Magnus Linklater is right about V.S. Naipaul. I had a similar experience with Philip Larkin, whose fiction and poetry I had admired for several years before Andrew Motion's revelatory biography came out around 1990, and forced me to see Larkin's work in a new light, but it hardly destroyed my admiration despite initial unease and even shock.
Naipaul has had a complex history, and he has developed a complex sensibility. His ancestors had gone from India to Trinidad as indentured labourers, he won a scholarship to Oxford, and after graduation decided to pursue no other profession but writing, with Flaubertian dedication. Though he has his quarrel with England, he is probably more English than anything else. His attitude to India has varied from the deep dissatisfaction of the 1960s "An Area of Darkness" to the more recent sensing of great possibility there. He is an individualist and an original, unafraid to see and say what others shy away from.