The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Tapa blanda

'Brilliantly researched, Hastings captured the turmoils and tragedies that shaped the great writer's life' * Sunday Mail Adelaide * 'Compelling' * Daily Express * '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 * 'Here's Selina Hastings at her best, which is saying something . . . thoroughly researched and elegantly written' * Sunday Telegraph (Seven) * 'Supple, confident and written with the same beady detachment shown by the writer himself * Daily Telegraph * '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 * 'The year's best biography by far' * Sunday Express * 'Engrossing . . . a brilliant evocation' * Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times * '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 * '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. Hastings's book cannot be bettered' * Richard Davenport-Hines, Sunday Telegraph * '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 * '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 *

Selina Hastings is a writer and literary journalist who worked on the Daily Telegraph for fourteen years and subsequently became the literary editor for Harpers & Queen. She has published biographies of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann. Her biography of Waugh won the Marsh biography prize.