Look/Listen

 

1. "Doctored truth is not truth." Naipaul to French, helping us understand why he felt fine giving the respected British journalist access not just to his own incriminating letters and opinions, but the diaries of his late first wife, Pat, whom Naipaul treated capital-p poorly. 

2. "Friendship has not been important to me." Naipual, making it sound as if he had options. (When you're mean-spirited, bitter, petty, self-absorbed, whiny and cheap, you probably don't. How whiny? In an otherwise pleasant passage about why he likes staying in hotels, Naipaul champions their "scope for complaint." A more interesting or telling phrase I've rarely come across.)

3. "I became my flat, my desk, my name." The future Nobel Laureate, whose work became his world in order for it to become ours.

4.  "Some of this remembered response to Oxford was retrospective superiority, Vidia's reaction to the university's cultivated sense of exclusivity." "Retrospective superiority" -- a fine phrase, cooly used by this fine biographer.

5. "Vidia is so proud of never using the word love." From Pat's diary.

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Journalism, long a refuge for intelligent individuals who by nature are wasted on the academy, was a natural home for Hearst. Journalism was an open field where his broad-ranging mind could indulge his political interests or whatever else happened to catch his eye. Journalism was an opportunity to make a difference, which mattered to Hearst; despite his carefree poses, he had absorbed some of [his mother] Phoebe's noblesse oblige and passion for a cause. Journalism supplied fireworks too -- action, conflict, unpredictability, novelty, spectacle. A newspaper was a great thundering enterprise in itself, involving hundreds of people in the hurly burly of newsgathering and the massive manufacturing operation required to print and deliver hundreds of thousands of copies daily.