VS Naipaul on Writers and Their People

Here's what Chandrahas Choudhury writes in his blog The Middle Stage about VS Naipual's new book A Writer's People (The Middle Stage):

"The path leading up to VS Naipaul's A Writer's People is littered with a writer's rubble: the debris, that of canonical figures knocked off their pedestals. Henry James: 'that dreadful American man…the worst writer in the world actually.' Thomas Hardy: 'an unbearable writer…doesn't know how to compose a paragraph.' Ernest Hemingway: 'didn't know where he was, ever, really.' EM Forster's A Passage To India: 'it has only one real scene, and that's the foolish little tea party at the beginning.' Jane Austen: 'If the country had failed in the nineteenth century no one would have been reading Jane Austen.'"

Apparently VS Naipaul (never known to mince his words) is out to mangle a few literary reputations. I am just waiting to get my hands on a copy of the book!