W Somerset Maugham

 
If ever there was a one man literary event, it must have been his. For he and he alone surmounts those most difficult of barriers between fact and fiction.

The film version of 'Quartet' is just marvellous; talk about making the language live!

Apart from the excellent acting and production skills required once the imagery is taken off the page, the stories themselves are marvellous. They describe a world that has by and large disappeared; where things like honour, loyalty, duty, piety, innocence, dress, humour all assert a presence; people being people embedded in their own emotional realities. Conversations are lean, fully declared, not at all mannered and there is a kind of charge in some undercurrent of the deep in all the characters.

There is something in the last story 'The Colonel's Lady' about making time for poetry. Extraordinary!