Wonderful but brutal: V S Naipaul from the eyes of a friend, student

The strain of brutality that ran through his thought came from a desire to be unassailable, to never, as he would say, "fall into lies"

V S Naipaul, who towered over the landscape of post-colonial literature, died on Sunday. He was my friend, my mentor, my teacher. I learned about his death from a one-line email from his widow, Nadira: “Vidia has gone gently into the night.”

Vidia, as Naipaul was known to his friends, was born in 1932 in Trinidad to a family of Indian origin who had come as indentured labor after the abolition of slavery. Over a 50-year career, he gave young writers like myself — in India, in Africa, in the Islamic world and in South America — a searing glimpse