The Nobel Prize winner writes candidly about what has shaped his interpretation of literature and the world ‘My purpose is not literary criticism or biography. I wish only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which I was exposed.’ For the ‘serious traveller’, one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul’s own father), to which is added the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world). There is England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way, and inevitably for a colonial Indian there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi