All his life Maugham would ask what sort of thing is this soul. He put the question at length in The Razor's Edge, and gave an answer he did not really believe but which captured the approbation of the crowd, hence its tremendous success….

Maugham kept his large audience for five decades because of an acute contemporary sense. He timed The Razors Edge when a desire for religious comfort was arising from the sorrows of World War II. His hero seeks out the gurus, turns to Yoga and Buddhism. The novel evoked an immediate response in the reading world…. (p. 21)

All his life Maugham could never resist putting people he knew into his books under the faintest disguise. He was often faced with threats of libel actions, and some parts of the world seethed with indignant victims who had entertained him. He professed always to be surprised, and often stoutly refused to admit he had used living persons, some of them friends….

Maugham had made great fun of the Grand Old Man of Letters cult in Cakes and Ale. [At 80,] he was one himself. All his life the critics had ignored or sneered at him. How could a man who sold millions of his books be any good? A petulant critic, Edmund Wilson, outraged by 'his swelling reputation in America' had asserted that he was 'a half trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers who do not care much about writing'. Not a word of this was true. Maugham never wrote a clumsy sentence, his themes were never trashy, he was read by all classes, including those who knew something about writing, such as Desmond McCarthy, Frank Swinnerton, Cyril Connolly, Theodore Dreiser and St John Ervine. Dr Calder has no doubt about him. 'He has produced much more of lasting value than Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, McKenzie and Waugh,' he proclaims.

With age, and world-wide fame, his pen still active, Maugham had become The Master. The Establishment that had ignored him for 80 years had to take notice, however grudgingly…. (pp. 22-3)

Three years before his death he published an appalling series of autobiographical articles, Looking Backward. They expressed the rage of an old man lapsing into senility, a vengeful, disgusting exhibition that shook his friends and scandalised his public. Instead of a serene sunset, like the rose of evening that fell around the Villa Mauresque, the black clouds of an old man's venom darkened the scene. (p. 23)