after the Second World War, and his last years were marred by senility. He died at the age of 91. Life and career Background and early years William Somerset Maugham came from a family of lawyers. His grandfather, Robert Maugham (1788–1862), was a prominent solicitor and co-founder of the Law Society of England and Wales. Maugham's father, Robert Ormond Maugham (1823–1884), was a prosperous solicitor, based in Paris; his wife, Edith Mary, née Snell, lived most of her life in France, where all the couple's children were born. Robert Maugham handled the legal affairs of the British Embassy there, as his eldest surviving son, Charles, later did. The second son, Frederic, became a barrister, and had a distinguished legal career in Britain – The Times described him as "a great legal figure" – serving as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (1935–1938) and Lord Chancellor (1938–1939). The two younger sons became writers: Henry (1868−1904) wrote poetry, essays and travel books. Shortly before the birth of the Maughams' fourth son the government of France proposed a new law under which all boys born on French soil to foreign parents would automatically be French citizens and liable to conscription for military service. The British ambassador, Lord Lyons, had a maternity ward set up within his embassy – which was legally recognised as UK territory – enabling British couples in France to circumvent the new law, and it was there that William Somerset Maugham was born on 25 January 1874. Maugham never greatly liked his middle name − which commemorated a great-uncle named after General Sir Henry Somerset − and was known by family and friends throughout his life as "Willie". Maugham's mother died of tuberculosis in January 1882, a few days after his eighth birthday. He later said that for him her loss was "a wound that never entirely healed" and even in old age he kept her photograph at his bedside. Two and a half years after his mother's death his father died, and Maugham was sent to England to live with his paternal uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, the vicar of Whitstable in Kent. After spending the first ten years of his life in Paris, Maugham found an unwelcome contrast in life at Whitstable, which according to his biographer Ted Morgan "represented social obligation and conformity, the narrow-minded provincialism of nineteenth-century small-town English life". He found his uncle and aunt well-meaning