Napalm bombs

This is what I like about VS Naipaul: he's such a master of the art of the deliberately inflammatory quote.
"While condemning terrorism, Naipaul, 72, blames Saudi Arabia for funding it. 'All this comes from Saudi Arabian money. I don't know who we are kidding. Here is the war on terror and it is being subsidised by an ally.'
He further adds: 'It (Saudi Arabia) has contributed nothing to the world - it has just filled the gambling dens and brothels. They are not fine people actually.'"
Anita Sethi gives Magic Seeds a respectful review:
"Magic Seeds is a novel about broken communication, as in the many half- written letters Chandran composes to his sister. In their failure to cross the void, they carry a tragic message that there are more worlds, more words, in our shared world, than we can ever know. But it is in depicting so lucidly the half-built dreams which haunt the liminal spaces of forest, hotel room, prison cell and airport lounge, that Naipaul finds his peculiar kind of artistic completion and achieves a startlingly desolate eloquence."
The Scotland on Sunday review is less ecstatic:
"The London chapters form a sustained and depressing meditation on a civilisation that has apparently unravelled itself. Mapping the decline of England, a country which has become 'the most horrible kind of socialist parody', the novel seeks to place the blame entirely on the pernicious effects of council housing and state benefits. Naipaul reaches for a surprisingly ugly and hate-filled rhetoric to make his case against the rise of barbarism (although these opinions are presented as Roger’s rather than the author’s)."