Sir Vidia’s shocking treatment of those closest to him is revealed in a new biography that suggests he is emotionally immature, selfish and self-pitying. It also contains the author’s own confession that his mental cruelty towards his wife may have killed her.

The disclosures, in the biography by Patrick French will be serialised in The Daily Telegraph from Saturday.

Trapped in triangle

According to the biography, Patricia Naipaul, who was married to Sir Vidia for 41 years from 1955, knew about his long-standing mistress, Margaret Gooding, almost from the beginning and suffered almost a quarter of a century trapped in the triangle.

She, however, learned that her husband regularly saw prostitutes here only after he boasted about it in a magazine interview in 1994.

She had just had a mastectomy and was in remission from cancer. She found the disclosure so abhorrent that it sent her rapidly downhill and she died two years later, Mr French has stated in his biography. “I think that consumed her. I think she had all the relapses and everything after that,” Sir Vidia said. “She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.’’

The author was given free access to all of Sir Vidia’s papers and he is the first person ever to read Lady Patricia’s 24 volumes of diaries, kept under lock and key at the University of Tulsa since Sir Vidia sold it for 620,000 dollars.

Even Sir Vidia is thought not to have read his wife’s journals.

They have led Mr French to paint a picture of a bleak, largely loveless marriage in which Sir Vidia frequently put his wife down — he refused even to buy her a wedding ring. He often abandoned her to go traveling with Ms Gooding, the married Anglo-Argentine with whom he fell in love in 1972, and they periodically lived apart.

Trapped and unable to leave the husband she worshipped, Ms Patricia’s diaries reveal how she became little more than his cook and carer, and how for a time she became dependent on Mandrax, the prescribed sedative.

Dull life

In one diary entry, Ms Patricia, who had met her future husband at Oxford, recorded: “Vidia told me he had not enjoyed making love to me since 1967.’’ Then he told her: “You don’t behave like a writer’s wife. You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.’’

But he met Nadira, a divorced Pakistani journalist, and he arranged for her to fly to his home in Wiltshire just six days after Lady Patricia’s death and they married two months later.