Urge to peep behind the stage to witness how your favourite author wrote the books you have adored to distraction must be common among obsessive readers. But books are produced not merely in the process of writing them out. A writer’s workshop is much larger than his study, the chair he sits upon, and the table on which he writes. Life is his workshop. Every experience is grist to the mill that produces his work. The Summing Up is W. Somerset Maugham’s expression of his thoughts on the art he practiced all his life. He wrote the book when he was sixty. In it he indulges the peeping Tom among his readers; but only those who are curious about his writing. He believed it was 'dangerous to let public behind the scenes'. If, in this book, he loosens the guard a little, it is because at sixty he feels that for him ‘the race now is nearly run and it would ill become' him to conceal the truth. ‘This is not autobiography nor it is a book of recollections. In one way and another

   Our man in Havana Graham Greene   English spy story, that is true to life, probably began in early twentieth century with Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden tales. Maugham worked for secret service during the second world war. He was stationed in Lucerne, in the neutral Switzerland, and was also sent to Russia ‘ to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war’. He wrote a few short stories based on these experiences. These are collected in his book,  Ashenden.  Ashenden was Maugham’s chosen pen-name. In the preface to the collection, Maugham wrote that ‘this book is a work of fiction, though I should say not much more so than several of the books on the same subject that have appeared during the last few years and that purport to be truthful memoirs’.   Later Graham Greene and John Le Carre wrote popular and acclaimed books in this genre. Commenting on his work as a spy, Maugham said in the preface that, ‘t he work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whol