The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage
Irony punctuation mark was used earlier by Marcellin Jobard in an article dated June 11, 1841, and commented in an 1842 report. Hervé Bazin, in his 1966 essay "Plumons l'Oiseau" (“Let's pluck the bird”), used the Greek letter ψ with a dot below for the same purpose . In the same work, the author proposed five other innovative punctuation marks: the “doubt point” , “conviction point” , “acclamation point” , “authority point” , and “love point” . In March 2007, the Dutch foundation CPNB "(Collectieve Propaganda van het Nederlandse Boek)" presented another design of an irony mark, the "ironieteken": (). Tom Driberg