Luke’s Reviews > The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography > Status Update
Luke
is on page 453 of 640
[...] Maugham and Virginia Woolf were walking [...] when [...] bombers came over. "[I] shouted at [Virginia] to take cover but in the noise she couldn't hear [...] She made no attempt to take cover but stood in the middle of the road and threw her arms into the air. She appeared to be worshipping the flashing sky. It was a most weird sight to watch her there, lit up now and then by the flashes from the guns."
— Aug 11, 2025 08:03PM
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Luke’s Previous Updates
Luke
is on page 530 of 640
In his eighties Maugham continued to write because in a sense he had no choice. "The fact is that, like drinking, writing is a very easy habit to form & a devilish hard one to break[.]"
— Aug 18, 2025 07:48PM
Luke
is on page 389 of 640
Decades later, For Services Rendered was to be recognized as one of Maugham's finest dramas, but for the middle and upper classes of the 1930s such radical pessimism was unpalatable; at a time of political instability and acute economic depression, audiences were angry at what they saw as a lack of patriotism, and they were made uncomfortable by the author's dismal prediction for the future.
— Aug 10, 2025 05:27PM
Luke
is on page 111 of 640
[Maugham] wrote to his literary agent, J.B. Pinker, to sever the association between them, explaining that he now had so many requests for plays he would no longer have time to write stories—a letter that Pinker sensibly chose to ignore.
— Jul 20, 2025 05:05PM
