Somerset Maugham and the Maugham Dynasty

Somerset Maugham and the Maugham Dynasty is a frank and uncompromising biography of the Maugham family from the 1800s to 1981.
In Bryan Connon's vigorous reassessment of Willie Somerset Maugham's life, we see a different Maugham from the one of popular myth. Instead of the shy stuttering medical student, there is the young man about town thoroughly at home in the Louche social circles of Oscar Wilde's London.
Throughout his brilliant career Willie led a double life: his marriage to Syrie was a sham and he spent much of it abroad with his American lover, Gerald Haxton, who had been barred from the UK as a security risk. In 1927 he finally left England to live on Cap Ferrat in the Villa Mauresque, dubbed by Noel Coward 'the other Vatican'. Here he played pontiff and received the famous and the infamous, everyone from royals to rent boys.
In his final years, senile and manipulated by Alan Searle, his elderly and avaricious secretary-lover, he attempted to disown his daughter and adopt Searle as his son. The mockery that greeted this was kept from him, as was the anger and derision caused by his memoirs, in which he attacked his dead wife and claimed to be a red-blooded heterosexual.
Also told in this book is the story of the life and work of wartime hero Robin, second Viscount Maugham, author of Come to Dust and The Servant.