From a Washington Post obit by Harrison Smith headlined “Patrick French, renowned biographer of V.S. Naipaul, dies at 56″:

In the opening pages of “The World Is What It Is,” his prizewinning 2008 biography of author V.S. Naipaul, Patrick French tried to make sense of his subject’s colossal ambition, a striving for greatness that led Naipaul to abandon his homeland of Trinidad for the flourishing literary world of mid-century England.