Sukhdev criticizes on the basis that Naipaul’s sentences are not imitative of the excitement, looseness, edginess and dirty hustle of what London represents for him personally – but all this says is that it is not mimetic of how he views London. Which is fair enough, but it does not meet Naipaul on his own plane – it speaks on the assumption that London can only be rendered one way, that London writing must be only about ‘the streets’.

And to categorise this as a ‘narrow vision’ of London seems to me erroneous – Naipaul’s work contains depths if you disregard the mimetic fallacy – that prose and sentences have to represent in some way the ‘sprawl and energy’ of London, and it misses the point – that the way Naipaul writes about London tells you exactly what you need to know about his work’s response to the city – the loneliness, pitilessness, anonymity, fear, coldness. There is a kind of disapproval in Sukhdev’s description of how ‘none of his characters dares to embrace the sprawl and chaos of the city, but step back prudishly, sipping without gulping’. But maybe that is the whole point?

To describe this as a narrow vision simply because it does not concur with a grand vision of the city seems a narrow perception in itself. And it does a disservice to London – London, the greatest city, is all things, all landscapes, dirty, refined, fading, energetic, depressed, chaste, sluttish, intimidating, liberating. London contains everything – all responses to her are legitimate.