Word: maugham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These considerations failed to alarm the only speaker at the conference whose family was actually at war-British Novelist Somerset Maugham. Mr. Maugham rose to report that war had not weakened but strengthened family ties. To the learned sociologists' warnings, Mr. Maugham irritably retorted: "I don't see that the family has anything to do with it. If an air raid sounds, you go to the nearest centre, if you are a nervous person, and if not, you go about your business. Before doing either, you don't look around for the rest of your family...
...Maugham added a warning of his own: The trouble with France was that family ties, especially between mothers and sons, were too close. This unhealthy condition, said he, contributed in no small measure to France's moral breakdown and final defeat...
...picture with atmosphere, an elusive quality for movies. He keeps his audience strained with a most effective dramatic time bomb - the constant feeling that something very bad is about to occur. Bette Davis helps with a display of psychopathic evil as repulsive as her Mildred in that other Somerset Maugham cinema success, Of Human Bondage. Herbert Marshall, more limber than usual, behaves appropriately for a true-blue British colonial. James Stephenson, hitherto confined to furnishing British background, gives the part of the lawyer a distinguished, neatly devised piece of acting...
Like Chaucer and Somerset Maugham, Werfel himself sits in a dim corner in the role of storyteller: "I knew Teta. . . . It could never have entered my mind that I should one day attempt to record the history of this old serving-woman who could only barely read and write." Like the Grimms and W. H. Hudson, Werfel suggests the far away and long ago: "Yet now I am sitting here, at a strange table in an alien land, painfully evoking the memory of a world that has been submerged into the past. . . ." Like Scheherazade and O. Henry, Werfel...
Rebuking British Author Somerset Maugham for a reference to the "thrilling and original poetry of T. S. Eliot." deep-eyed, soil-revering Author-Poet Carl Sandburg (Abraham Lincoln; The People, Yes) counseled a Manhattan audience: "If you wish to pray or if you wish to sit in silent meditation in a quiet corner and have music of words, you will get it from this poet. But if you want clarity on human issues, he's out - he's zero . . .antidemocratic . . medievalist . . . royalist . . . and so close to Fascist that I'm off him, to use a truck driver...