SOURCE: Eagleton, Terry. “A Mind So Fine: The Contradictions of V. S. Naipaul.” Harper's Magazine 307, no. 1840 (September 2003): 79-84.

In the following review, Eagleton places Naipaul within the context of other English literary emigrés and contends that the essays and speeches collected in Literary Occasions chart “the extraordinary spiral of displacements that make up Naipaul's career.”

Arriving at Oxford University from a down-at-heel family in Trinidad, the eighteen-year-old V. S. Naipaul wrote: “Gone are the days of the aristocrats. Nearly everyone comes to Oxford on a state grant. The standard of the place naturally goes down.” It was as though Dick Cheney were to complain that there were too few Trotskyists in his golf club. My own entry into the dreaming spires, a decade or so later, was unfortunate for just the opposite reason: the place was positively swarming with patricians, almost all of whom seemed to be...