Thursday 11 October in my son’s flat in Ealing Broadway: the 10 pm BBC 1 News finally confirmed what for many years we had been waiting for: the Nobel laureate in literature (the hundredth as it turns out) was V.S. Naipaul. The news item was brief, a sentence at best, perhaps two, as matters far more important or at any rate much more immediate took up much of the news time. My eyes went moist and I said to my wife, ‘It is such a relief, I have lived with his works for so long.’

In a sense Naipaul is the writer whom I know best, although the Naipaul bibliography mentions me at most thrice. Yet he is there in much of what I write in my style; in my attempt to break into the grand narratives of English literary history; even, shamefully, in my barely suppressed nostalgia for the Pax Britannica. I have lived with Naipaul for some forty years and very much in his shadow. He has also denied me the privilege of originality by being everywhere before me: the Indian plantation diaspora, Oxford, India.