London, June 2: Just days after shaking hands with travel writer Paul Theroux, with whom he had a 15-year-old feud, Sir V.S. Naipaul appears to have deliberately courted fresh controversy by appearing to claim that no woman writer could be as good as him.

“Women writers are different, they are quite different,” Naipaul, who does enjoy giving offence, said in a newspaper interview published today.

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not,” the Nobel Prize winner said.

“I think [it is] unequal to me,” he added.

He said this was due to their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”.

“And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he went on, though his Pakistani wife, Nadira, may now be tempted to confiscate his supper.

“My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh,” Naipaul told The Daily Telegraph in London. “I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

This barb seemed aimed at Diana Athill, who was his editor at Andre Deutsch until 1975 and whom he dumped after she had, exceptionally, expressed her reservations about one of his books.

In her memoirs, Athill, now 93, confessed that whenever she felt depressed, she would remind herself that, at least, she wasn’t married to Naipaul. Her immediate response when Naipaul walked out was: “It was as though the sun came out. I didn’t have to like Vidia any more.”

Naipaul, who was speaking at the Royal Geographical Society on Tuesday, was asked if he considered any woman writer his equal.

He replied: “I don’t think so.”

Naipaul once tore a strip off India’s leading women authors for their “banality” in writing about issues such as colonialism and oppression of women.

One woman who witnessed the Naipaul-Theroux handshake and stayed on to hear the great man speak at the recent Hay Festival in Wales was (Lady) Kishwar Desai, the winner of the 2010 Costa prize for best first novel for Witness the Night.

“Tragic! If there was ever any doubt in our minds that Naipaul is now just an aging, angry old man, who probably wants desperately to be in the news, this proves it,” Kishwar, wife of the economist Lord Meghnad Desai, told The Telegraph (of India).

She was dismissive about Naipaul’s “meaningless remark”.

“In the past he has shown signs of Islamophobia among other things — and now that he has given up his feud with Theroux no doubt he wants to attract publicity once more,” she said.

“We should not even bother to discuss this completely mindless and outdated statement. He sounds like someone from the sixteenth century!”

“I think women writers need no endorsement from Naipaul,” Kishwar argued.

“His remarks just prove how out of touch he is with contemporary writing — he is missing out on so much good work. I was at the Hay festival and attended his event, which just proved how much he has aged, especially when he read out a prepared speech — all to himself.”

She described the occasion: “Very little was audible, but honestly it did not bother him and he did not check with us even once if we could hear him. Had it not been for Alexander Waugh’s wonderful ‘q&a’ with him we would not have been able to follow him.”

Kishwar showed she, too, can use a scalpel. “It was quite embarrassing because the audience started applauding even before he had finished reading the entire text — and Naipaul looked up surprised. He had been so lost in the sound of his own voice.”

The response from the newspaper bloggers has been as entertaining as Naipaul’s rant, as The Daily Telegraph described its own interview.

“He’s right,” responded one blogger.

Another agreed: “Good old Vidiadhar. A strongly (and well) expressed non PC opinion. Let’s have more of it.”

But there were reasoned counter-attacks.

“Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison won Nobel Prizes too,” it was pointed out. “Neither can be accused of writing with a narrow scope. I think Arundhati Roy is one of the most brilliant and original writers of the English language. All three of these ladies can write rings around Naipaul.”

Naipaul, who is 78, also earned a rebuke from the Writers Guild of Great Britain which said that the author had been described by his own authorised biographer, Patrick French, as “bigoted, arrogant, vicious, racist, a woman-beating misogynist and a sado-masochist”.

This alone should earn Naipaul another invitation to the Jaipur Literary Festival, with BA First Class tickets, five star hotel and pretty girl assistant to push his wheel chair thrown in.