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 ...

W. Somerset Maugham died in 1965 at age 90, and it's taken half a century for one of the most famous and successful writers of the modern era to receive a fully balanced biography. Selina Hastings' ...

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 ...

William Somerset Maugham CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was ...

During his long and event-filled life, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) sold nearly 80 million books, wrote many hit plays that ran in the West End and on Broadway, and published dozens of memorable ...

SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A Life. By Jeffrey Meyers. Knopf, 349 pp. $30. Who better to write a biography of the versatile, prolific and long-lived William Somerset Maugham than Jeffrey Meyers, himself an ...

The irony in the title of Selina Hastings' new biography of W. Somerset Maugham comes in the word "secret." Few writers made such copious, and obvious, use of his own life and experiences as did ...

Neither E.M. Forster (1879-1970) nor W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) lacks biographers. But in Forster's case, the recent availability of his diaries requires re-examination of the man and his work.

Moviegoers familiar with the Annette Bening vehicle "Being Julia" (2004) or Naomi Watts in "The Painted Veil" (2006) need hardly be told of the continued interest in adaptations of Somerset Maugham's ...

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 ...

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 ...