The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V.S. Naipaul
By Patrick French
Picador £20, 555 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

The subtitle of The World Is What It Is proclaims this to be the “authorized” biography of V.S. Naipaul. “Authorized” usually means “flattering”. That is spectacularly not the case here: there are so many warts on Patrick French’s portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer one can barely see the face.