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Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham ( ; 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 schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, ''Liza of Lambeth'' (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End theatre, West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories. Maugham's novels after ''Liza of Lambeth'' include ''Of Human Bondage'' (1915), ''The Moon and Sixpence'' (1919), ''The Painted Veil (novel), The Painted Veil'' (1925), ''Cakes and Ale'' (1930) and ''The Razor's Edge'' (1944). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Painted Veil (novel)
''The Painted Veil'' is a 1925 novel by British author W. Somerset Maugham. The title is a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1824 sonnet, which begins "Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life". The novel was first published in serialised form in five issues of ''Cosmopolitan'' (November 1924 – March 1925). Beginning in May 1925, it was serialised in the United Kingdom in eight parts in ''Nash's Magazine''. The biographer Richard Cordell notes that the book was influenced by Maugham's study of science and his work as a houseman at St Thomas' Hospital.Cordell. Richard A. "Somerset Maugham at Eighty" in ''College English'', Vol. 15, No. 4 (Jan. 1954), pp. 201–207. In the preface to his book, Maugham tells how the main characters were originally called Lane, but that this was subsequently changed to "Fane", following the success of a libel case against the publishers by a Hong Kong couple with the name of Lane. The couple were awarded £250. To avoid simil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Law Society Of England And Wales
The Law Society of England and Wales (officially The Law Society) is the professional association that represents solicitors for the jurisdiction of England and Wales. It provides services and support to practising and training solicitors, as well as serving as a sounding board for law reform. Members of the Society are often consulted when important issues are being debated in Parliament or by the executive. The Society was formed in 1825. The Hall of The Law Society is in Chancery Lane, London, but it also has offices in Cardiff to deal with the Wales jurisdiction and the Senedd, and Brussels, to deal with European Union law. A president is elected annually to serve for one year. The current president is Lubna Shuja, the first Asian and first Muslim president in the organisation's history. The Law Society has nothing to do with barristers in England and Wales. The relevant professional body for barristers is the General Council of the Bar. History The London Law Insti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Solicitor
A solicitor is a legal practitioner who traditionally deals with most of the legal matters in some jurisdictions. A person must have legally-defined qualifications, which vary from one jurisdiction to another, to be described as a solicitor and enabled to practise there as such. For example, in England and Wales a solicitor is admitted to practise under the provisions of the Solicitors Act 1974. With some exceptions, practising solicitors must possess a practising certificate. There are many more solicitors than barristers in England; they undertake the general aspects of giving legal advice and conducting legal proceedings. In the jurisdictions of England and Wales and in Northern Ireland, in the Australian states of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, Hong Kong, South Africa (where they are called '' attorneys'') and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers (called ''advocates'' in some countries, for example Scotland), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Searle
Alan Searle (1905-1985) became the private secretary and companion of W. Somerset Maugham following the death of Gerald Haxton in 1944. He took up residence at Maugham's villa in the Riviera and remained with him until Maugham's death in 1965. Maugham first met Searle in 1928, when Searle was "a very youthful looking twenty-three, a working class boy from Bermondsey, the son of a Dutch tailor and cockney mother".Selina Hastings, ''The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham'', p. 344 He was the lover of several famous older men, including Lytton Strachey, who called Searle his "Bronzino boy". Searle developed an antagonistic relationship with Maugham's daughter, Liza. In his final years, Maugham made an unsuccessful attempt to disinherit his daughter and to adopt Searle as his son. Following Maugham's death, Searle went into retirement in Monte Carlo. He was interviewed by the scholar Robert Calder Admiral Sir Robert Calder, 1st Baronet, (2 July 174531 August 1818) was a Britis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Riviera
The French Riviera (known in French as the ; oc, Còsta d'Azur ; literal translation " Azure Coast") is the Mediterranean coastline of the southeast corner of France. There is no official boundary, but it is usually considered to extend from Toulon, Le Lavandou or Saint-Tropez in the west to Menton at the France–Italy border in the east."Côte d'Azur, côte méditerranéenne française entre Cassis et Menton" ("Côte d'Azur, French Mediterranean coast between Cassis and Toulon") in ''Dictionnaire Hachette encyclopédique'' (2000), p. 448."Côte d'Azur, Partie orientale du littoral français, sur la Méditerranée, de Cassis à Menton" ("Côte d'Azur, Eastern part of the French coast, on the Mediterranean, from Cassis to Menton"), in ''Le Petit Larousse illustré'' (2005), p. 1297. The coast is entirely within the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France. The Principality of Monaco is a semi-enclave within the region, surrounded on three sides by France and fronting the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Seas
Today the term South Seas, or South Sea, is used in several contexts. Most commonly it refers to the portion of the Pacific Ocean south of the equator. In 1513, when Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa coined the term ''Mar del Sur'', or South Sea, the term was applied to the entire area of today's Pacific Ocean. In 1520 Ferdinand Magellan named the same ocean the Pacific Ocean, and over time Magellan's name became dominant. The South Sea term was retained, but was applied only to southern areas of the Pacific. The term South Sea may also be used synonymously for Oceania, or even more narrowly for Polynesia or the Polynesian Triangle, an area bounded by the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand and Easter Island. Pacific Islanders are commonly referred to as South Sea Islanders, particularly in Australia. Origin The Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa coined the term "South Sea" when he traveled across the Isthmus of Panama and reached the Bay of San Miguel, na ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerald Haxton
Frederick Gerald Haxton (1892 – November 7, 1944), a native of San Francisco, was the long term secretary and lover of novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham.Hastings, Selinia. ''The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham'', New York: Random House, 2010 He and Maugham met at the outbreak of World War I when they both began serving as part of a Red Cross ambulance unit in French Flanders. Secrecy and arrest Maugham, and to a lesser extent Haxton, had been affected by the trial of Oscar Wilde. Common to men who were either homosexual or in the case of Maugham who had sexual relationships with both men and women (Maugham had had an affair with the actress Sue Jones before meeting Haxton and later had a child with Syrie Wellcome whom he married), neither spoke of their situation for fear of recrimination. However in November 1915 Haxton and another man, John Lindsell, were arrested in a Covent Garden hotel in London and charged with gross indecency. Royal Military Police, Military po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting occurring throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, and parts of Asia. An estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in combat, plus another 23 million wounded, while 5 million civilians died as a result of military action, hunger, and disease. Millions more died in genocides within the Ottoman Empire and in the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war. Prior to 1914, the European great powers were divided between the Triple Entente (comprising France, Russia, and Britain) and the Triple Alliance (containing Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy). Tensions in the Balkans came to a head on 28 June 1914, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdina ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Highbrow
Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, "highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. The term, first recorded in 1875, draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, which teaches that people with large foreheads are more intelligent. Applications "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the European classical music, classical music tradition; to literature—i.e., literary fiction and poetry; to films in the art film, arthouse line; and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The term ''highbrow'' is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discerning or selective; and ''highbrow'' is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres—opera and classical". The first usage in print of ''highbrow'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Mixture As Before
''The Mixture as Before'' is a collection of 10 short stories by the British writer W. Somerset Maugham, first published by William Heinemann in 1940. British Library, accessed 6 November 2016. In the foreword, Maugham writes, "When my last volume of short stories was published ''The Times'' headed their review of it with the title ''The Mixture as Before''. This of course was meant in a depreciatory sense, but I did not take it as such.... The writer has his special communication to make.... there is in his personality a certain abundance he may continue for a long time to produce work which is varied and characteristic; but the time comes at last... when, having given what he has to give, his powers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
