William Somerset Maugham 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 of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
George Henry Sanders was a British actor and singer whose career spanned over 40 years. His heavy, upper-class English accent and smooth, bass voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous characters. He is remembered for his roles as Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), Scott ffolliott in Foreign Correspondent, The Saran of Gaza in Samson and Delilah (1949), the most popular film of the year, Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, Sir Brian De Bois-Guilbert in Ivanhoe (1952), King Richard the Lionheart in King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Mr. Freeze in a two-part episode of Batman (1966), and the voice of Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). Fans of detective stories know Sanders as Simon Templar, The Saint, (1939–41), and the suave crimefighter The Falcon (1941–42).
A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. An example is "gosh" for "God".
The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a fictional giant rat, first mentioned by Arthur Conan Doyle in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire". As part of the tale, the protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, declares that there is a "story" connected with this rat, presumably a detective case he has handled. The name of the rat and its implied unpublished history were later used in works by many other writers.
Five Little Pigs is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in May 1942 under the title Murder in Retrospect and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943. The UK first edition carries a copyright date of 1942 and retailed at eight shillings while the US edition was priced at $2.00.
"Uncle Fred Flits By" is a short story by British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, which was published in the United States in the July 1935 edition of Redbook, and in the United Kingdom in the December 1935 issue of the Strand. It was included in the collection Young Men in Spats (1936).
George William Lamming OCC was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He also held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.
Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West is the penultimate novel in the Aunt Jane's Nieces series, written by L. Frank Baum as "Edith Van Dyne" and published in 1914.
George Edwin Eldredge was an American actor who appeared in over 180 movies during a career that stretched from the 1930s to the early 1960s. He also had a prolific television career during the 1950s. He was the older brother of actor John Dornin Eldredge.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
For Services Rendered is a play by Somerset Maugham. First performed in London in 1932, the play is about the effects of World War I on an English family.
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
The Moon and Sixpence is a 1942 film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1919 novel of the same name, which was in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. Dimitri Tiomkin was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. Two versions were filmed. In one, Devi Wani, a Javanese actress, played Ata; in the other, Ms. Verdugo played her, to accommodate audiences for whom marriage between a Polynesian and an Englishman was considered unacceptable.
Ric Young is a Malaysian-born British character actor. He is best known for his role as Dr. Zhang Lee in the TV series Alias (2001–04) and as the henchman Kao Kan in the Steven Spielberg film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Isle of Fury is a 1936 American adventure film directed by Frank McDonald and starring Humphrey Bogart, Margaret Lindsay, and Donald Woods. It was produced and distributed by Warner Bros.
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.
The Narrow Corner is a 1933 American pre-Code drama film directed by Alfred E. Green and starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Patricia Ellis and Ralph Bellamy. It is an adaptation of Somerset Maugham's 1932 novel The Narrow Corner. It was remade in 1936 as Isle of Fury.
The playwright, novelist and short-story writer W. Somerset Maugham, was a prolific author from the late 19th century until the 1960s. Most of his earliest successes were for the theatre, but he gave up writing plays after 1932. Many of his plays have been adapted for broadcasting and the cinema, as have several of his novels and short stories. The New York Times commented in 1964, "There are times when one thinks that British television and radio would have to shut up shop if there were not an apparently inexhaustible supply of stories by Maugham to turn into 30-minute plays. One recalls, too, the long list of movies that have been made from his novels − Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, The Razor's Edge and the rest.
