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
Slash (punctuation) a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European virgule (, which was used as a period, scratch comma, and caesura mark. (The first sense was eventually lost to the low dot and the other two developed separately into the comma and caesura mark .) Its use as a comma became especially widespread in France, where it was also used to mark the continuation of a word onto the next line of a page, a sense later taken on by the hyphen . The Fraktur script used throughout Central Europe in the early modern period used a