Posts
W. Somerset Maugham in Lilliput - March 1938
Lilliput, Mar. 1938W. Somerset Maugham
Lilliput. The Pocket Magazine for Everyone 2.3 (Mar. 1938).
A few days ago, when I received a tiny padded A5 envelope I was not certain what it contained. I had been ordering some books and magazines; a few came in huge boxes stuffed with newspapers or foam peanuts, but I was not expecting anything so small.
A magazine it was. I was a bit surprised by its size, in contrast with its contemporaries that I usually get. I looked eagerly for the Maugham refere…
Analysis: "To lead you to an overwhelming question ...": Points of View (1958) by W. Somerset Maugham
Points of View (1958) - W. Somerset MaughamPoints of View (London: Heinemann, 1958)
Points of View is a collection of essays by W. Somerset Maugham, first printed in 1958, the penultimate work in book form that the author published.
It consists of five essays: "The Three Novels of a Poet," "The Saint," "Prose and Dr. Tillotson," "The Short Story," and "Three Journalists." From what Stott registers, it seems that only "The Saint" was pu…
Reorganization
Just a short note about the reorganization of the blog. I have cleaned up the pages and reorganized them into Maugham ePortal. This fancy name is for what were previously called the Free eBooks pages, separated by their genres: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Non-Fiction, and Media (videos). Criticism of Maugham and Useful Links (which is dying for an update...) also fall under this category. Their addresses have not changed, so if some of you who have very kindly backlinked do not have to chan…
"But you were living before that,/ and also you are living after": Grant Overton on W. Somerset Maugham
Recently, perhaps something like in the last two months, I came across several old (and some not so old) books on Maugham by or on people who knew him, which gives me an idea to write a series of posts on them, linking them together to construct an image of W. Somerset Maugham.One of these books, And did he stop and speak to you?, such a playful title, delightful, gives me a name for these posts. G. B. Stern, known as "Peter," used a line from Robert Browning's poem "Memor…
In Between Purely for My Pleasure (April 1962) and "Looking Back" (June 1962) - W. Somerset Maugham
As I mentioned in an earlier post, one stumbles upon things while one is looking for something else, which jerks one back from a reverie. It is intriguing and disturbing at the same time. This is a brief post just to show a little advertisement on the dust jacket of the first UK edition of Purely for My Pleasure (1962), so that I can stop thinking about it."Looking Back," the very controversial memoirs, first published in three issues in Show in 1962, was several years in the making…
Two Editions of Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham
Theatre (1937) is one of my favourite novels by W. Somerset Maugham. The most recent film adaption, Being Julia (2004), directed by István Szabó and with Annette Bening as Julia Lambert is, I would say, the most Maugham of Maugham movies. But all this is by the way. When I started to collect Maugham's first editions, my goal was to get all the first editions apparently; it must have been naïve of me not to think that I would probably end up having several copies of many of his books.I bou…
W. Somerset Maugham and Noilly Prat
Although this post may seem like a commercial for Noilly Prat, I assure you that it is not.Some time ago I came across this page of advertisement on sale, and I have to say that I fully agree with W. Somerset Maugham, yet again. Lamentably, where I am now, Noilly Prat is not to be got. It should not be a problem, since I tend to believe that nothing is indispensable, but you know how the mind can trick you. For some time I made do with Dolin... however, memory lingers, in the funniest way.�…
