Vintage books Plays. Volume One Maugham William Somerset

Witty, comedic and engrossing, this second collection showcases the range of W. Somerset Maugham’s talent as a playwright. The delightful satires of marriage Lady Frederick and Home and Beauty are included here alongside the insightful war drama For Services Rendered, and Maugham's tense colonial drama The Letter. Eclectic in theme and sardonic in style, these plays are masterpieces of English social comedy and melodrama

Somerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with an urbane, wry style all his own. The Gentleman in the Parlour is an account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life

Maugham's studies of the lives and masterpieces of ten great novelists are outstanding examples of literary criticism at its finest. Afforded here are some of the formulae of greatness in the genre, as well as the flaws and heresies which enfeeble it. Written by a master of fiction, Ten Novels and Their Authors is a unique and invaluable guide

Two tigers cannot share the same mountain - Chinese proverb • Despite geographical proximity, cultural similarities, and shared status as highly powerful nations, China, Korea and Japan love to hate each other. Why? • In search of an answer, Michael Booth journeys across East Asia to explore the mutual animosity that frequently threatens to draw the world into all-out war. From misjudged cake decorations to electoral meddling, contradictory origin myths to territorial disputes, this deeply researched and hugely entertaining book shows that no conflict is too small to keep the fires of neighbourly hostility burning

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places, he noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper. In the resulting collection we encounter Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know

William Cavendish, the father of the first Earl, dissolved monasteries for Henry VIII. Bess, his second wife, was gaoler-companion to Mary Queen of Scots during her long imprisonment in England. Arbella Stuart, their granddaughter, was a heartbeat away from the throne of England and their grandson, the Lord General of the North, fought to save the crown for Charles I • With the help of previously unpublished material from the Chatsworth archives, The Devonshires reveals how the dynasty made and lost fortunes, fought and fornicated, built great houses, patronised the arts and pioneered the railways, made great scientific discoveries, and, in the end, came to terms with changing times

'One of the great books about Spain' - Tristan Garel-Jones, Observer • A many-tangented pilgrimage through ten centuries of Spain's history, its politics, its art, literature and architecture, its climate and its people, in which Nooteboom unlocks doors to an undiscovered Spain and reveals his obsession for a country he has come to know intimately over the course of forty years

One warm summer's day at the beach, forty-year-old Cordelia Grinstead, dressed only in a swimsuit and beach robe, walks away from her family and just keeps on going • After hitching a ride with a stranger to a new town where she knows no one, she reinvents herself as a single woman with no ties and begins living a new life altogether. But how long can she keep this up before her real life finds her?

One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock finds one of his captains waiting eagerly on his doorstep. He has sold Jonah's ship for what appears to be a mermaid • As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock's marvel. Its arrival spins him out of his ordinary existence and through the doors of high society, where he meets Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on... and a courtesan of great accomplishment. This meeting will steer both their lives onto a dangerous new course • What will be the cost of their ambitions? And will they be able to escape the legendary destructive power a mermaid is said to possess?

One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the 'cancerous' Soviet police state. Withdrawn from publication in Russia in 1964, it became, along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that awoke the conscience of the world. As Robert Service wrote of its appeal in the Independent, 'In waging his struggle against Soviet communism, Solzhenitsyn the novelist preferred the rapier to the cudgel'

One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family is understandably perturbed and he finds himself an outsider in his own home. In 'Metamorphosis' and the other famous stories included here, Kafka explores the confusing nature of human experience with sly wit and compelling originality

One windy spring day in the Chilterns, Joe Rose's calm, organized life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects, could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Rose's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness