Wrote explosive biography of Naipaul

Patrick French, who has died of cancer aged 56, was a brilliant writer with a mischievous sense of humour and a keen eye for the absurd; he was particularly known for his studies of India and Tibet, though he was also responsible for possibly the most astonishing authorized biography ever published — that of the novelist Sir Vidia Naipaul, better known as VS Naipaul.

The author of acclaimed novels such A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and Guerrillas, and winner of the Booker and the Nobel Prizes for Literature, Naipaul was, and by many still is, regarded as one of the most sublime novelists of his age.

But French's acclaimed 2008 biography, The World is What it Is, portrayed a bigoted, selfish and self-pitying genius who tormented his first wife Pat for decades, visited prostitutes, and for 24 years had a sado-masochistic relationship with his mistress, Margaret Gooding, who left her husband and two children for him.

He eventually abandoned Margaret to marry another woman, to whom he proposed while Pat was dying of cancer.

The book was written with the full co-operation of its subject who, in passages shocking in both their candour and cold-bloodedness, told his biographer that his mental cruelty toward Pat may have killed her. Married to Naipaul in 1955, she only learned that her husband regularly saw prostitutes when he boasted about it in an interview in 1994 — at a time when she was recovering from a mastectomy and was in remission from cancer.

“I think she had all the relapses and everything after that,” Naipaul said. “She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.”

Patrick Rollo French was born on May 28, 1966, the oldest of four children of Major Maurice Aloysius French, a Korean War veteran, and his second wife, Lavinia, née Burke. He was educated at Ampleforth, where he became a lifelong friend of the historian and India expert William Dalrymple.

Though Patrick had no family connection to India, he became fascinated by the country as a boy, making the first of many visits as a 19-year-old university student, and also by Tibet, after the Dalai Lama paid a visit to Ampleforth when French was 16. After taking a degree in English and American Literature at Edinburgh University he stayed on to do a PhD in South Asian Studies.