Getting The Willies

Time for a Maugham revival, says Tania Kindersley: "Maugham was blisteringly successful in his day and is now hardly read. If he is thought of at all, it is as a creaking reminder of distant colonial days - all those stories of the Orient, the smart ladies, the stiff upper lip. His reputation can hardly have been burnished when Jeffrey Archer blatantly lifted the short story, The Luncheon, for A Quiver Full of Arrows. Homage from Lord Archer? Instant literary death."