The writer and the world

During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional and sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest longer pieces of reflection and reportage - many of which have been unavailable for years - are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored a variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided prism of his own experience.
Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu's mad reign in Zaire, the New York mayoral elections or the enduring tragedy of Argentina, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the many ways in which the world works.