Paulin, who won the Somerset Maugham prize in 1977 for his first collection of poetry, A State of Justice.

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"I think the greatest short story writer of all time was Somerset Maugham, " he said, expressing admiration for English dramatist and writer.

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Somerset Maugham found enough fodder there for his Borneo Stories and Joseph Conrad used it as the setting for a tale in The Last of His Tribe.

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The most obvious flaw is the ardent young man, Tom Fennel, an Englishman in Maugham's book but now an American played, perfunctorily, by an English actor named Shaun Evans.

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But Maugham's sly quip also reminds us that nonvisual "abstraction, " for all its historical significance, has never become truly popular with mass audiences and neither, for that matter, has visual abstraction.

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Result: the sort of rambling gentleman's lair one imagines Somerset Maugham nestled into while writing one of his voluptuous tales of local intrigue when this country was still known as Siam.

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In truth, Fellowes is a wildly insightful writer about human emotion whose understanding of what makes people do and feel as they do brings up Somerset Maugham in a distant sense, and Jay McInerney in a more modern sense.

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Though politicians, educators and their media enablers would have us believe that the act of earning a college diploma makes short people tall, turns bad writers into Somerset Maugham, and the mathematically challenged into highly-paid engineers, reality is happily intruding.

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