Selina Hastings – författare

For nearly sixty years Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most famous writers in the world. An enormously successful playwright and the author of over a hundred short stories and twenty-one novels - several of which are now established classics - Maugham expertly concealed a private life. Predominantly homosexual, and deeply in love with the charming but dissolute Gerald Haxton, he made a disastrous marriage to Syrie Wellcome which he would escape by travelling and writing extensively in the Far East. A talented linguist, during both world wars Maugham worked for British Intelligence. In between he moved in literary and theatrical circles in London, New York and Hollywood and entertained lavishly at his luxurious villa in the south of France. Outwardly his life was richly rewarding, but privately he suffered anguish from an unrequited love affair and a shocking final betrayal.Acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings has had access to Maugham's extensive private correspondence as well as to important family testimony, which sheds a fascinating new light on this complex and extraordinary man.

'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily TelegraphSybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready. Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art.'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator'An extraordinary story' The Times'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the Year