No more alimony, tra la la
Miranda Carter: Somerset Maugham, 17 December 2009
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham
by Selina Hastings.
John Murray, 614 pp., £25, September 2009,978 0 7195 6554 0 Show More
by Selina Hastings.
John Murray, 614 pp., £25, September 2009,
“... In his lifetime, Somerset Maugham was the most successful writer in the Anglophone world. By the time he was 90, 80 million copies of his books had been sold, he was a media celebrity and a very rich man. He had also lived, as Selina Hastings says, ‘much of his life under cover’. He went to great lengths to erase evidence of his private life, systematically destroying his personal papers, asking friends to burn his letters, and instructing his executors to discourage would-be biographers ... ”