Razor's Edge (Maugham)

Book Reviews
The story is carried forward with Maugham's usual deftness and ingenuity of manipulation. Everything has been provided for from the start: no loose ends are left trailing. In some points the technique is tiresome and outmoded—the set elaborate descriptions...nothing left to the imagination. The writing is direct.... [T]here is no attempt to avoid the conventional turn; the reader has no impulse to dwell on a passage for its special rightness of phrasing or perception... [and] few intentions that life much deeper than the surface.
New York Times


[Maugham’s] excessively rare gift of story-telling...is almost the equal of imagination itself.
Sunday Times (London)


It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham.... He was always so entirely there.
Gore Vidal


Maugham remains the consummate craftsman.... [His writing is] so compact, so economical, so closely motivated, so skillfully written, that it rivets attention from the first page to last.
Saturday Review of Literature