Word: somersets
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...Ogden Nash, Hubert Humphrey, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lucille Ball and Maurice Chevalier, and most of them are worth a story or two. Mayes treated them with amused kindness, helped them through personal crises and paid them well, even for that golden age of magazines: $10,000 per short story for Somerset Maugham; a Ford station wagon shipped to Dublin for Waugh. Today Mayes rails against magazines for being parsimonious and tells his younger colleagues: "Publishing would be nothing but another business if it weren't for the editors who give it some semblance of a profession...
...pivotal characters are fictional: an aging bestselling novelist named Kenneth Marchal Toomey and Carlo Campanati, an earthy Italian priest destined to become Pope. Toomey is modeled on W. Somerset Maugham and Campanati is an exuberant exaggeration of Pope John XXIII...
...Bath in 1759, he was determined to be the mirror of the upper 5% of England, the gratin who came there to take the waters, exchange scandal in the Pump Room and pursue their intrigues, sexual and fiscal, in the ambit of the great country houses of Wiltshire and Somerset. This was not a vocation for a social critic. Gainsborough completely shared the values of the class he depicted. If that made his portraits a little monotonous in social tone, it helped save them from the hateful obsequiousness of modern society painting. For Gainsborough...
...Male is still selling. And so are many of the 27 other books that Household, now 79, has turned out since. They are set all over the world, and told by a variety of narrators. But some of the best, like The Sending, unwind in the mind of a Somerset Englishman. There the old white magic continues to cast its spell...
That is Household's power too. In his hands all Alfgif's odd doings somehow seem simple and natural and rare as a June day in Somerset...