A barge-sized bowl of seafood rigatoni stuffed with tiger prawns, mussels, squid and cockles costs pounds 4.75. It’s also constantly bursting at the seams – the arty- studenty types who drop in off the street tend to be quoted an hour’s wait for a table.When you see the menu, you understand why. Despite having something close to a monopoly on non-ethnic/non-caff food in the area, their low, low prices are breathtaking. London is outrageously expensive if you insist on sticking to West End chain places. But it’s amazing how quickly after you leave Zone One that provincial prices start to kick in without you having to suffer the rush- covered bottles of the provincial trattoria.

We know, okay? There’s no need to bang on about how much less a pint of beer/sandwich/ cinema ticket/meal would have cost in Hull, because we heard the same from the last person who scraped the cobwebs off their wallets and bought a bus ticket to the smoke. Small and Beautiful, for instance, is a euro-bistro on the Kilburn High Road, three minutes’ walk from Kilburn Tube and under the arches at Brondesbury BR station.
This place isn’t particularly small – it takes up two shop-fronts and must be able to seat 50 – but it is, in its own way, quite beautiful: one of those pared-down brick-and-timber establishments with a half-mosaic, half-stripped-board floor and leavening for the eye in the form of Botticellis and gigantic Rococo-framed mirrors.It’s friendly enough, too, even repelling local winos with an element of good manners. Such a celebration of the sacred reveals Naipaul in a new light, even if his portrayal of Islamic societies is still predictably dark.. One of those things that everyone in London hates about people from the North is the way they go on about how much everything costs. Hence the sudden confession, which comes halfway through the book, of his Trinidadian past, and the real reason for his abandonment of the island: the absence of the sacred there, and the eradication of its pre-Columbian worship.

Its key passages deal not with turmoils in Indonesia, Iran or Pakistan but within Naipaul himself. That he shows genuine sympathy for them is completely unexpected. The originality of this travelogue lies not so much in its descriptions of societies gripped by fundamentalist beliefs as by the autobiographical glimpses it offers to the reader.In a peculiar way, Beyond Belief is a journey towards self-discovery. One such, the Indonesian scholar Dewi Anwar, believes passionately in the sacredness of place: a sacredness rooted in an awareness of the spirits of earth and of the animal kingdom. The ancient spirit world of nature has been denied by modern Islam, and by the financiers of Indonesia’s skyscrapers: hence the possibility of the country’s ecological and economic collapse.That Naipaul gives space to the expressions of ideas about the sacred is surprising to begin with.