Word: somersets
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...Somerset Maugham. --Ogden Nash...
...subtle, manipulation which some characters play at a leisurely pace, others with greater determination. Curiously, as the intrigue unfolds, the audience begins to recognize itself on stage. In horror, or delight, spectators watch the dissection of the characters' worst sides--their own. The Grand Old Man is W. Somerset Maugham, the British playwright, novelist and essayist, and the Riviera mansion, as well as the drama, is his. Maugham in his lifetime presented his friends and acquaintances with many such little surprises. Today Ted Morgan turns the spotlight back, dazzlingly, into Maugham's eyes. Morgan, in his meticulous biography, sketches...
Early in The Moon and Sixpence, William Somerset Maugham wrote, "Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy." Maugham was 45 when that novel was published in 1919; he had another 46 years ahead of him. But even a novelist of his energy could not have imagined a life that began with Victoria on the throne and ended with the crowning of the Beatles...
...Somerset Maugham become a master of self-defense? Previous biographies contain partial answers and frequent obfuscations. The aged author not only burned much of his correspondence before he died but also misled many writers about his life. One academic produced an entire book without ever suspecting that his subject was homosexual...
...year after W.S.M.'s death, this fact became popularly known when Robin Maugham, a favored nephew, hastily published Somerset and All the Maughams. Those familiar magazine photos of the leathery legend haughtily observing the world from Villa Mauresque, his home on the French Riviera, could now be openly read as the image of an old iguana sniffing the Mediterranean air for young sailors...