Word: maughamism
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Very few people read William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) anymore. But in the lands that used to form the British Empire he was immensely popular, from the 1930s right through to the 1980s, and he has a small fan base still. In his native England, he was a well-loved dramatist whose record of having four plays running concurrently in the West End remained unbroken for a generation. He climbed dizzying heights of fame and prosperity, lived a long life (of which nearly six decades were in circumstances of great renown), and besides being a writer was a doctor...
...Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings, the acclaimed biographer of the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann, has written a magnificent, gripping account of the contrarieties that were held together in Maugham's personality. An aloof, private socialite; a socialist patriot who loved titles and the aristocracy; one of the most famous writers on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century but never recognized by the critical intelligentsia. Hastings exposes the polarities. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...Eliot prize in 2005 for her collection of linked love poems, Rapture. She's also won the Dylan Thomas award, the Whitbread poetry prize, the Somerset Maugham award and the Forward prize...
...country derided as far too orderly to ever be interesting, a surprisingly large crop of writers has been drawn to Singapore. Joseph Conrad has given sinister life to its mangrove-wreathed port, W. Somerset Maugham has brought murder to its torpid rubber plantations and Paul Theroux has given us the pornographic delights of its Vietnam War-era brothels...
...radiantly appetizing...her presence was like breakfast on a sunny morning," Christopher Isherwood confessed to his diary in 1941 when he was a recent arrival in Hollywood, writing scripts for MGM. Nine pages later, he's not only describing the Marx Brothers jumping all over Somerset Maugham, "screaming like devils," but also watching Aldous Huxley and Charlie Chaplin singing old London music-hall songs on the Santa Monica Pier. No wonder the unchanging center of Isherwood's life, the Hindu Vedantist teacher Swami Prabhavananda, asked his worldly disciple to bring the Duke of Windsor to his Hollywood temple: Isherwood...