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Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 8 November 1930: 'We had a terrific visitation from Hugh Walpole. If you want a book from the Times, get Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham. All London is ringing with it. For there poor Hugh [Walpole] is most cruelly and maliciously at the same time unmistakably and amusingly caricatured [as Alroy Kear]. He was sitting on his bed with only one sock on when he opened it. There he sat with only one sock on till 11 next morning reading it [...] He almost wept in front of Hilda Matheson, Vita [Sackville-West] and Clive [Bell], in telling us. And he couldn't stop. Whenever we changed the conversation he went back.'
'I've just finished reading "Liza of Lambeth" It is certainly worth reading--but whether it's worth talking about is another question. I at any rate have nothing to say except this--that I do not like society novels--and Liza to me is just a society novel--society of a kind.[...] It will be fairly successful I believe--for it is a "genre" picture without any atmosphere and consequently no reader can live in it. He just looks on--and that is what the general reader prefers.' Conrad then compares the novel to George Du Maurier's illustrations.
'More stimulating was the reading of Somerset Maugham's short novel, "A Christmas Holiday".'
'His reading in 1938 and 1939 had been mainly of memoirs and biographies: Boswell, Greville, Logan Pearsall Smith's Unforgotten Years, Siegfried Sassoon's The Old Century, Somerset Maugham's The Summing-Up ("a very honest confession of faith").'