Here is William Dalrymple on V.S. Naipaul’s new book of essays:

A Writer’s People is an indulgent grand old man’s book: meandering, ponderous and pedantic, full of narcissism and touchy self-regard; it is as if Naipaul’s famous Olympian disdain has finally left him exhausted—the acidity of his own derision now makes him write contemptuously even of those he once loved and admired.

There is a tragedy here.As Philip Roth has so dramatically shown, old age need not mean the end of a great writer’s productivity. Humility, energy and ambition can still spur even the finest writer to attempt to scale ever greater peaks. Naipaul, in contrast, has died as a writer: the more he writes about his calling, the more impotent his pen seems to have become. The wisdom, the warmth, the humour and, above all, the compassion have all gone from the prose; and what we are left with now is only the bitter and desiccated husk of that once lively, warm and surprising writer from the village outside Port of Spain.