"Sure. I've read several of his novels."
"I was thinking of Maugham the British Agent, rather than Maugham the
novelist, but it's the same man."
"British agent?"
"Um-m-m. He was sent to Petrograd in 1917 to prevent the Bolshevik
revolution. The Germans had sent Lenin and Zinoviev up from Switzerland,
where they'd been in exile, by a sealed train in hopes of starting a
revolution in Czarist Russia. The point I'm leading to is that in one of
his books, 'The Summing Up,' I believe, Maugham mentions in passing that
had he got to Petrograd possibly six weeks earlier he thinks he could
have done his job successfully."