'V S Naipaul kept a mistress for almost 24 years’

The 75-year-old novelist, born to Indian parents in Trinidad and has been living in Britain since winning a place in Oxford, has admitted in his biography that he frequently humiliated his first wife (Patricia) and even refused to gift her a wedding ring.

Naipaul often abandoned her to go travelling with Mrs Gooding, the married Anglo-Argentine with whom he fell in love in 1972, and would often tell his wife how he was missing his mistress but then say that he needed Lady Patricia to help him with his books, it has been revealed.

"I was liberated. She (Patricia) was destroyed. It was inevitable," the Nobel laurate said.

The book, penned by Patrick French who was given free access to all of Naipaul's papers, claims that the novelist started visiting prostitutes when the couple were living in London three years after they married.

"In the summer of 1958, turning imagination into reality, he (Naipaul) started to have sex with prostitutes. He would find their telephone numbers in local newspapers and visit them in the afternoon in secret while Pat was at work as a school teacher," The Daily Telegraph reported on Friday, quoting the biography.