The Nation, check out our latest issue.
Subscribe to
Support Progressive Journalism
The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today.
Did you know you can support
The Nation by drinking wine?
Living in the shadow of a genius can destroy your life, but there’s much to recommend a slightly more distant proximity to incandescent talent. In his recent essay collection A Life in Paragraphs, Robert Fulford, widely regarded in Canada as the nation’s finest cultural critic (although enjoying less repute in the wider world), reflects on all the dismaying biographies that detail the miserable frailties of towering talents. He notes that the authorized life of V.S. Naipaul shows the novelist to have “monstrously mistreated both his first wife and his long-time mistress, out of a bottomless narcissism that allowed no room for the feelings of anyone but himself.” And that a spa