Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment

Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment. When he wrote novels about the aristocracy he sincerely believed that its members were dissipated and immoral, and yet had a certain nobility and an innate aptitude for governing the British Empire; when later he wrote of the middle classes he sincerely believed that they were the backbone of the country. His villains have always been villainous, his heroes heroic, and his maidens chaste

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale (1930), 16

As a coda, this portrait of Roy, which goes on for some time, is apparently easily identified as Hugh Walpole, who on reading it reported 'Half-dressed sitting on my bed, picked up idly Maugham's Cakes and Ale. Read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself. Never slept' (Ibid, xii)