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Patrick French is a writer and historian, best known for his work The World is What It Is: The Authorised Autobiography of V.S. Naipaul

What does spirituality mean to you?
I suppose it is some intrinsic automatic religious impulse in a person.
And to a certain extent, I also associate it with a late Victorian or early twentieth century term, a social phenomenon of people adopting the idea of spirituality because it would play out well in their personal or social life.

This association probably comes from writing Francis Younghusband’s biography --- he had all sorts of ideas trying to found a new world religion and so on. And there were many people at the time for whom spirituality had become more of a social activity.
But that meaning is secondary to the first answer I gave.

How does it manifest in your personal life?
It doesn’t.

Did you have a religious upbringing?
Yes, I had a Roman Catholic upbringing and was sent to Catholic schools. The secondary school I attended was run by Benedictine monks, so in a way I took on some of the almost political views that the Catholic Church had at the time, particularly the idea of having a social conscience.
But the actual spiritual side I didn’t take up particularly.

In fact, I became disillusioned both with the institution and practice of Catholicism pretty young. I was 14 or 15 and thought it made no sense to me --- it made no sense in an internal way, and also I disliked a lot of the things the Catholic Church was promoting, like the idiotic policy on contraception, or their teachings on various issues of personal morality. So I moved away from that. And that mental rejection was complete around 17.

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