Word: maugham
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...forfeits his social standing. He is a maharaja's tax clerk who, influenced by Gandhi's politics of poverty, makes false account entries in favor of poor landowners. Unwelcome at home and in danger of prosecution, the upstart takes cover as a mute beggar. A touring W. Somerset Maugham is impressed by this bogus act of mystical piety and is inspired to write his best selling novel, The Razor's Edge. The faker becomes a celebrity and names his son Willie Somerset Chandran...
...with an explanation of Willie’s name. His Brahmin father narrates the twisted trajectory of his own adolescent rebellion in India. To spite his family and his caste, Willie’s father becomes a sadhu, or ascetic holy man. By chance, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham meets him while researching The Razor’s Edge. Maugham’s influence on Willie’s father is strong enough that, once a proper wife is found, the son gets Maugham’s first and middle names. The wife—Willie?...
...several instances led to such duplicities. Some believe that once the English spy Guy Burgess felt he had betrayed the idea of heterosexuality, it was an easy step to betray his country. He already felt like an alien at home. But the analogy is too facile. Real hypocrisy, Somerset Maugham once said, "cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a full-time job." I'm sure Robert Hanssen well understood that...
...things," to indicate he was praising the condition. Unhappily, one of the things he was out of was his mind. In a movie, Oscar Levant told Joan Crawford, "Don't blame me, lady. I didn't make the world. I barely live on it." Somerset Maugham dignified the dreaming-out-the-window business. "A state of reverie," he said, "does not avoid reality; it accedes to reality." I like that--accedes to reality...
...almost perfect specimen of the genus 'peach,'" says dashing reprobate Rowley Flint (Sean Penn) to the truly peachy Mary Pantin (Kristin Scott Thomas) in this stilted version of a Somerset Maugham trifle about the moneyed class inconvenienced by lust and Fascism in 1938 Florence. It's the sort of stiff-upper-Brit badinage that one may think one is nostalgic for, until one hears it played straight in a film with no glamour (the cinematography makes everyone look blotchy), urgency or sense. Really, my pet, it's all just too terribly terribly...terrible...