Word: maugham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Somerset Maugham: "I sit down with a fountain pen and paper and the story pours out. However lousy a section is I let it go. I write on to the end. Then the subconscious mind has done what it can. . . . The rest is simply effort . . . polishing, rewriting the lousy parts . . . going over a chapter time and time again, until, though you know it isn't right, it is the best...
...Human Bondage (Warner) is a handsome, efficient, totally unnecessary film remake of Somerset Maugham's 1915 novel. It contains few surprises for anyone who has ever read the reputedly autobiographical book or seen the well-made 1934 movie with the late Leslie Howard and Bette Davis...
...Alexis has made quite a Hollywood careeer of inspiring heroes, especially composers (the film George Gershwin and the film Cole Porter, both under Alexis' magic spell, sat right down and dashed off their best music). But she doesn't quite click with the screen's young Maugham. The poor boob goes right on yearning for that impossible, vulgar hashslinger...
THEN AND NOW (278 pp.)-W. Somerset Maugham-Doubleday...
...current historical-novel bug has bitten even Somerset Maugham. With Then and Now he leaves the 19th and 20th Centuries for the first time since his Making of a Saint (1898), retreats 400-odd years to the Italy of Cesare Borgia and Niccoló Machiavelli. Then and Now is a talky, occasionally witty costume piece about Machiavelli in love and Borgia in his glory. It is also an ironical sermon on the unchanging wonders of human nature. Novelist Maugham, now 72, denies that he preaches sermons of any kind. Said he recently: "I think it is an abuse...