My father never twisted the truth, even if it was ugly

I enjoyed the piece by Robert McCrum regarding my father. I always find it interesting to read about him as a writer and what the world thinks of him, but for me, he is my father. The man who gave me a second chance. The man who, to a huge extent, motivated me to turn my life around. He listened to my options even if he disagreed and probed me to look deeper into them.

He never twisted the truth, even if it was ugly. He said it as he saw it. The way French describes him in the book only made me realise that he is human. Human beings make choices, whether they are good or bad, and that is what sets us apart from animals.

He lived a life and a full one. He is my hero and my dad, who made me see the world with its goodness and its ugliness.

Maleeha Naipaul

Address supplied

That we should find ourselves, nearly five years since his death, fixated still upon the same handful of lurid misdemeanors says much more about the state of our literary culture than about the man subjected to such an acute moralistic reduction.

McCrum is quite right to note that, in his day, Sir Vidia was England’s greatest living writer. He remotivated the language, setting a new standard for generations of writers. He gave the liberal West a wry, sometimes scalding, account of the rest of the world.  All this he did with the melancholic authority of one whose own life had been shaped by the forces he chronicled, his story “a kind of cultural history”, as he told McCrum.

He was in this a pioneer, occasionally to suffer the scorn reserved for newcomers with new perspectives. Not that his achievement went unattested by contemporaries. But an adequate reckoning of it remains to be done and will require years of serious reflection. Hence the dreary sadness of this latest episode: if the things to which he devoted his life truly mattered to us, an occasion to remember him would move us to more than reflexive pearl-clutching.

George Andreou

Address supplied

Robert McCrum does an excellent job of explaining the complexity around VS Naipaul and his work, which has resurfaced upon the untimely death of his biographer Patrick French. According to Naipaul, fiction never lies and reveals a writer totally. And yet, when his novels are juxtaposed with French’s biography, it only goes as far as creating an indecipherable, mysterious writer. Perhaps we should leave the mystery be.

As for the writing, McCrum mentions the quality of Naipaul’s prose – arguably the finest writer of the English language – it’s worth noting his range, writing about people and places others didn’t consider. Between his fiction and non-fiction, his scope is truly global. Ignoring his work would be a great disservice to ourselves and the future generation of readers.

Could cancel culture be getting out of hand when a state in the US considers Michaelangelo’s David pornographic?

Ahsan Akbar

London

The Archbishop of Canterbury, it seems, is writing to the Ugandan president to talk him out of new extreme anti-gay legislation which plans to impose the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”.

What an untenable position from someone who himself upholds that gay sex is a sin!

As the Church of England is viewed as Uganda’s “mother church” it should look to the example it sets. The Archbishop may sit at a different point on this sliding scale of discrimination, but Welby is surely not due a medal for condemning gay execution.

Neil Barber

Edinburgh