Word: maughams
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...pseudoallegorical meaning underlined. Laurel, the 13-year-old girl in the house, is impetuous, over-self-conscious, and neurotic in just the way one would expect from her family background. As she herself says, "My case is in Freud." Dominating the household is Laurel's grandmother, Mrs. St. Maugham, who typifies a way of life that is aristocratic, self-indulgent, warped, and gone forever. Her eccentricities, together with those of the Charles Addamsish butler, are not so well justified by the playwright. But still, all the characters are tastefully and humorously drawn, without the slightest resort to the burlesque...
...King Farouk (the only even near representative of royalty to appear) came lumbering up the carpeted central staircase that was reserved for the bridal party. An alert guard decoyed him to one side. Seated way up front was Britain's frail old Author Somerset Maugham, complaining of cold feet. Near by sat swart Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon, whose ownership of the gambling casino is a far more significant fact in Monte Carlo than the rule of Prince Rainier. Filling other rows were the aging, wheelchaired Aga Khan and his beauteous Begum, the French Academy's Andre...
Many British critics think that the author of A Perfect Woman is just about a perfect novelist. At 60, Leslie Poles Hartley couples some of the skill and suavity of Somerset Maugham with a show of sympathetic interest, an emotion that Maugham controls to the point of asphyxiation. Hartley's technical aplomb helped to make The Go-Between (TIME, Aug. 9, 1954) one of the most admired novels of its year. In A Perfect Woman he demonstrates with good humor and feline subtlety how many ways there are for an author to tap and bat his characters around before...
Color Shots. Novelist King, 33, who spent a winter on Corfu with the Somerset Maugham Award money received for his last novel, The Dividing Stream, has scraped the marrow of his Greek characters. He recognizes their fortitude under real pain, their histrionics over emotional trifles and their bristling pride. Above all, he captures their gift for draining each passing moment of life as if it were a glass of their own villainous retsina wine. Author King overexposes and underdevelops his hapless English hero, but his color shots of Corfu are snapped with the eye of a Matisse, and Patrick...
...goes to Hawaii. When Sheree refuses to let him live on the air base as "a sort of male camp follower," he decides to aloha the boom. One day she finds him sprawled, like a particularly depraved passage out of Somerset Maugham, in a little grass shack in the banana slums, with not much more than a pith helmet between him and the kind of girl a man likes to have under the palms. She's the cook, he explains. Next day the Mrs. moves the Mr. into Air Force quarters...