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Review
'This steady-eyed biography of an extraordinary, extravagant, generous and bitter artist will not only fascinate its readers but encourage some to go to his work for the first time'
(Times Literary Supplement, Jeremy Treglown )'Hastings' Life of Maugham is pitch-perfect: supple, confident and written with something of the same beady detachment (and enjoyable signature streak of malice) as the great tale-teller himself'
(Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph )'Hastings provides a searing emotional history...her closing chapter...is so powerfully written, in places so shocking, as to give a series of physical jolts to the reader.
'Every so often, a biography appears of such authority and such power that it is more than a chronicle of a human life, it is a work of art...brilliant...such is Selina Hasting's skill that this horrible story is richly enjoyable'
(A. N. Wilson, Reader's Digest )'Engrossing . . . a brilliant evocation'
(Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times )'The year's best biography by far'
(Sunday Express )'Selina Hastings has coped manfully with the task of summarising Maugham's huge oeuvre without distracting her readers from his long and eventful life'
(The Oldie )'Supple, confident and written with the same beady detachment shown by the writer himself
(Daily Telegraph )'Here's Selina Hastings at her best, which is saying something . . . thoroughly researched and elegantly written'
(Sunday Telegraph (Seven) )'In a period when literary biographies have fallen out of favour, Hastings's magisterial life shows ut he peaks that the genre can reach . . . The book teems enjoyably with stars, spies and scandals'
(Independent )'Compelling'
(Daily Express )'Brilliantly researched, Hastings captured the turmoils and tragedies that shaped the great writer's life'
(Sunday Mail Adelaide )Product Description
For nearly sixty years Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most famous writers in the world. An enormously successful playwright and the author of over a hundred short stories and twenty-one novels - several of which are now established classics - Maugham expertly concealed a private life. Predominantly homosexual, and deeply in love with the charming but dissolute Gerald Haxton, he made a disastrous marriage to Syrie Wellcome which he would escape by travelling and writing extensively in the Far East. A talented linguist, during both world wars Maugham worked for British Intelligence. In between he moved in literary and theatrical circles in
Acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings has had access to Maugham's extensive private correspondence as well as to important family testimony, which sheds a fascinating new light on this complex and extraordinary man.
(20100730)
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Maugham was a fascinating charcater hugely successful both critically and commercially as a writer of plays, short stories and novels in the first half of the twentieth centuary though he seems to have dropped of the radar in recent decades. He was gayer than a 1970's San Francican bathouse at a time when it was illegal, had a string of lovers, mainly male, but with time to fit in a marriage from hell and a spell as a secret agent for the British government.
This is a brilliantly told story of a fascinating man and life, it has that great quality of being both erudite and easy to read. Even if you have little interest in Somerset Maugham to start with you will thoughly enjoy the book as has all the readability of a great novel. Can't recommend it too highly.
The history of Somerset Maugham's disrupted childhood, tortured marriage, and sometimes tormented sexual relationships, is not short of the kind of pain and unresolvable dilemmas that Maugham frequently depicts in his novels and stories, (and which are arguably his chief theme.) "He was a fearfully emotional man, sexually", one woman said. In Hastings' account of this life, the fame and wealth he achieved through his literary success provided satisfactions he enjoyed, but, particularly towards the end of his life, they became a two-edged sword.
It is thrilling to read about Maugham's purposeful determination, as a young man, to succeed as a writer, first with his plays and then with the stories and novels. Hastings describes his later journeys to imperial outposts such as Malaya, in search of literary ideas, with an absorbing sense of adventure. Maugham's eventful life covered almost a century and it feels almost epic, but it has to be said that the end of this story is heartbreaking stuff, very disturbing, leaving this reader at least, with a sense of disquiet.
marveling at the close of his life. He was castigated and destroyed by his own hubris. Read more
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