Word: somerset
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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POINTS OF VIEW (284 pp.)-W. Somerset Maugham-Doubleday...
Among Behrman's great circle of literary and artistic friends were Gabriel Pascal, Somerset Maugham and Sir Max Beerbohm, and about these people he tells some of his most entertaining anecdotes. One day, Pascal--the Hungarian producer who procured the screen rights to all of Bernard Shaw's plays--said to Behrman, "Sahm, you know I ahm illegitimate descendant Talleyrand." Two weeks later, Behrman met Pascal again and the producer said, "Sahm, did I tell you I ahm illegitimate descendant Metternich?" Recounting these incidents in an unpublished New Yorker profile of Pascal, Behrman wrote, "Whatever differences may have separated...
...Mississippi Heart Hand. For bridge's enduring and growing popularity, urbane Novelist William Somerset Maugham has a simple explanation: "Bridge is the most entertaining and intelligent card game the wit of man has so far devised." Of all partnership card games, bridge is the most challenging to the mind. Nobody can become a good bridge player through experience and rule learning alone; the game requires thought. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, and the value of every one can be modified, sometimes drastically, by the distribution of unseen cards in other hands. Even an incurably cautious...
...Marlbh" (as the architect of Blenheim Palace, Sir John Vanbrugh, described her) outlived not only her husband, but Anne, Anne's successor (George I) and most of her own children. Widowed at 62, she rejected offers of marriage from an earl and from the proud Duke of Somerset. Marlborough had loved her passionately (tradition has it that on coming home from the wars, he would "pleasure" her even before he had taken off his boots), and Sarah's reply to Somerset has gone down in history. "If I were young and handsome as I was," she wrote, "instead...
...bred a member of the Establishment, Novelist Powell writes about British upper-class tribal customs with the air of a man who knows that if an outsider wants an explanation, he is not worth explaining to. He lives in a Regency house near Frome in the county of Somerset, 100 miles from his office at Punch, that venerable and sometimes humorous magazine, where he functions as a slyly discursive book reviewer. "We [the British] are a very peculiar, very odd people," says Powell, looking down at his subject matter in the manner of the legendary clubman who liked...