and the most distinguished living writer of English. Success of this sort takes more than talent. It is also an act of will, and Naipaul's will has been exceptionally powerful. He is a master writer because he has seen himself as the servant of Literature. Nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of his work and his achievement. Everyone in his life has been subordinated to his self-imposed duty. He has used people and cast them aside. 'I have no friends', he says, though French shows how many have felt friendship for him. He is the outsider who, courted by the Establishment, has taken what he wanted from it, and yet remained the outsider. The only comparable figure is Bernard Shaw, and, like Shaw, Naipaul has never lost the ability to irritate, provoke, anger and dismay. Like Shaw he has sometimes been abrupt in judgement and silly, but like Shaw, never belonging completely to any single culture, he has seen what others have preferred not to see. Compare, for instance, John Bull's Other Island with An Area of Darkness, The Return of Eva Pern and Among the Believers. Naipaul is what the 1940s called a 'Displaced Person', displaced by History. Gravitating to the centre, he was able to view it with the same candid and unforgiving eye as he had trained on his native island. The title of the biography, The World Is What It Is, exemplifies his unflinching candour: no pretence, no sentimentality, contempt for self-proclaimed victims.