Somerset Maugham begins his novel Cakes and Ale with one of the more suave, and lethal, openings in modern lit: “I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, ...

W Somerset Maugham has written a book about his favourite novels. In this interview, Malcolm Muggeridge questions him about his choices, beginning with one of the authors who didn't make it into his ...

Like George Orwell, Henry James and other untrusting souls, W. Somerset Maugham wanted no biography; but unlike them, he provided a lesson in the odium which an indiscreet account of a life can bring ...

In his review of Selina Hastings’s biography “The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham” (July 25), David Leavitt does not mention Maugham’s most important secret life: that of a British intelligence agent ...

In 1954, shortly after his 80th birthday, William Somerset Maugham was shown the in-house abattoir of a Swiss clinic in Vevey and then injected with the minced foetus of a freshly slaughtered sheep by ...

The story of William Somerset Maugham, the stammering young boy who became a doctor and then the world’s most famous writer since Dickens, has often been told, but in this new biography, “The Secret ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham By Selina Hastings John Murray £25, 614 pages FT Bookshop price: £20 Somerset ...

According to The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings, the author was an unwise lover and not a cold fish, says Richard Davenport-Hines By Richard Davenport Hines 20 September 2009 • ...

William Somerset Maugham was at various times the most famous, successful and wealthiest living writer of the first half of the 20th century. His books outsold stellar contemporaries such as Robert ...

In 1953 Sir Gerald Kelly, the President of the Royal Academy, organized a dinner in honor of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to that august institution. Kelly asked Her Majesty if he might seat a certain ...