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

BBC: Poet Paulin 'banned from Harvard'

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

CNN: Life on the Straight Talk Express: All McCain, all of the time

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.

CNN: RELIVING THE DAYS OF THE COUP

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.

FORBES: Lifestyle Feature

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.

FORBES: Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down

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.

FORBES: India, and the Economic Folly of a College Degree