VS Naipaul: shockingly disloyal to his literary friend, claims Spurling

Biographer Hilary Spurling unmasks ‘vengeful’ posthumous reviews of Anthony Powell novels by onetime fan

A decade after the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul published his autobiography, some of his words have come back to haunt him – and sparked a literary feud involving three of Britain’s foremost writers.

Passages in which Naipaul dismissed the writing of the late novelist Anthony Powell have sparked condemnation from Hilary Spurling, the prize-winning biographer, who accuses him of carrying out an inexplicable “act of vengeance” against a loyal friend.

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