Over the course of his astonishing 50-year career, V S Naipaul's writing has been characterised by a commitment to truth that gives his work a unique luminosity and brilliance.

In A Writer's People, he brings unmatched clarity and rich experience to an exploration of the ways we think, see and feel. Naipaul writes about the classical world - what we have retained from it, what we have forgotten - and the more recent past. Figures as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi, Derek Walcott and Gustave Flaubert come under his compassionate scrutiny, as do his own early years in Trinidad, the silences in his family history and the roles played by Anthony Powell and Francis Wyndham in his first encounters with literary culture.