In his life time W. Somerset Maugham was celebrated for his plays, while posterity mainly remembers him for his novels and short stories. Maugham is not specifically remembered for his essays. Indeed, he wrote but few, and these were mainly written and published in his later life.

His success as a novelist had brought W. Somerset Maugham considerable personal wealth, so that in 1926 he bought a villa in the south of France. Conceived while he was in his late seventies, the essays in Points of view were written as diversions, or as the author put it "{i}t has given me pleasure to do so". The Vintage edition does not mention whether the essays were published in magazines or newspapers. The essays are characterized by a highly personal style, as it seems, less with publication in mind, and more to satisfy the author's personal needs.

In the first essay "The Three Novels of a Poet" Maugham reminiscences on his youth in Europe when he learnt German at school, and came to love Heidelberg and the novels of Goethe. The essays is a very personal reception of Goethe's life and work, described as characteristic for its time and describing the movement of Romanticism and the literary and cultural scene of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, discussing Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (English: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (English:Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) (1796) and Die Wahlverwandtschaften) (English:The Elective Affinities) (1809).

The next essay "The Saint" is based on experience gathered during Maugham's visit to India in 1936. It describes the religious culture of India, based in a description of a holy man, the Maharshi Venkataraman. While Indian religion has entered the cultural awareness of many well-educated Westerners since the 1970s, Maugham's experience in the 1930s must have been exotic, while his description of the essay in Points of view in 1958, must have been at least as refreshing. Nonetheless, the piece stands out somewhat awkwardly in a collection of essays that is mainly focused on the reception of Western literature.

The most interesting essay seems to be the third, entitled "Prose and Dr. Tillotson". The essay deals with the life and works of John Tillotson who worked and lived as a clergyman during the English Civil War period and the Restoration. The essay is somewhat muddled, beginning with a false start, and the third part being the most readable. On the whole, however, this essay, while somewhat difficult, is most rewarding.

Himself a successful author in the genre of the short story, the next essay, "The Short Story" describes the work of a number of masters of the genre, who were already famous in Maugham's time, such as Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant and Katherine Mansfield. In the final essay, Maugham ponders on "Three Journalists" and their work, that is to says authors who journalise, i.e. "keep a journal". The authors described in detail in this essays are Edmund de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Jules Renard and Paul Léautaud. There are asides to other literary figures during that period in French literature, such as Alphonse Daudet and André Gide.

Points of view offers a very mixed lot of essays, which readers are invited to enjoy as the author did while writing them, viz. leisurely, as a diversion. The organisation of this collection of essays seems to have exactly that reader in mind, starting with a light course on German literature, for entremeses a short piece of something exotic, a substantial main course in the form of the essay about John Tillotson. If the essay on "The Short Story" is a vintage wine, then "Three Journalists" can be taken as a cheese board, with three chunks and some lighter crumbs. ( )