The sea was very calm. There was no ship in sight, and the sea-gulls were motionless upon its even greyness. The sky was dark with lowering clouds, but there was no wind. The line...

Xiormonez is the most inaccessible place in Spain. Only one train arrives there in the course of the day, and that arrives at two o'clock in the morning; only one train leaves it,...

All her life Miss Elizabeth Dwarris had been a sore trial to her relations. A woman of means, she ruled tyrannously over a large number of impecunious cousins, using her...

Strickland is a well-off, middle-class stockbroker in London sometime in late 19th or early 20th century. Early in the novel, he leaves his wife and children and goes to Paris. He...

The Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped...

These are the memoirs of the Beato Giuliano, brother of the Order of St Francis of Assisi, known in his worldly life as Filippo Brandolini; of which family I, Giulo Brandolini, am...

A drawing-room at Lord Francis Etchingham’s house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane. An Adam room, with bright chintzes on the furniture, photographs on the chimney-piece and the...

Maugham wrote The Magician in London, after he had spent some time living in Paris, where he met Aleister Crowley. In this tale, the magician of the title, Oliver Haddo, a...

The world takes people very willingly at the estimate in which they hold themselves. With a fashionable bias for expression in a foreign tongue it calls modesty mauvaise honte;...

Of Human Bondage is Maugham's masterpiece strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham denied this stating that this was a novel not an autobiography, though much in it...