The Perfect Traveler - Somerset Maugham

Pico Iyer - The Perfect Traveler - Somerset Maugham - Features - World Hum: "In reality, however, Maugham was born in Paris and all his early letters were written in perfect French. As a teenager he studied in Heidelberg and then, having already mastered Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Russian, he went to Seville for 16 months in his early 20s and learned Spanish. He served in World War I as a volunteer ambulance driver and nurse—though he had four plays on at the time in London’s West End—and he became the West’s main source of intelligence in Russia during the weeks leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution."