Words by Jeffrey Susla, Nichols College It hardly seemed fair that after the ravages of Hurricane Ian, the weekend of 10-11 November 2022, found parts of Florida suffering the wrath of Hurricane Nicole, which closed regional airports and hotels, causing the South Atlantic Modern Language Association organisers, along with the Bond section co-chairs, Dr. Oliver…
Note to the reader: this review discusses several twists and surprises. If you haven’t read the book, do so before proceeding further! Review by Revelator. In his New Statesman review of The Man with the Golden Gun, Kingsley Amis described the expectations set by You Only Live Twice: One could hardly wait for the follow-up:…
Today, Wednesday 5 October, ‘James Bond Day’: Ian Fleming Publications Ltd (IFPL) announces plans to publish Ian Fleming’s books under its own imprint – a move that marks an exciting future for 007. Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the family company that owns the literary copyright in his books, will be honouring the legacy of James…
2022 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the film Dr. No and the publication of Ian Fleming’s ninth James Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me. Both these works represent watershed moments for the character of James Bond, the film launching the beginnings of Bond mania, and the novel presented from the female perspective, Bond himself absent until the…
Article by Frieda Toth James Bond is the most famous spy in the world. It doesn’t take much deep thought to parse that, in the words of the satirical musical Spies Are Forever, that makes him the WORST spy in the world. Bond’s flashy dress, catchphrase, and need to win at every game he plays make…
Article by Jeffrey Susla, Nichols College For the past six years, James Bond has had a prominent place at the annual South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference. In November 2021, it was held virtually and the sessions on Bond “Networks” were co-chaired by Oliver Buckton, Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, and Matthew Sherman,…
News just in of a welcome third outing for Anthony Horowitz in the James Bond series to be published on May 26th, 2022. Jonathan Cape, Vintage, and Ian Fleming Publications are delighted to reveal the title and front cover of award-winning novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz’s third official James Bond novel. Signed copies are available…
By Oliver Buckton Let me begin by saying I never actually met John Pearson in person. The closest I came to a “live” meeting was a phone conversation, somewhere back in 2019, when I called him from my office at Florida Atlantic University. The phone, reaching across the Atlantic to the UK, seemed to ring…
Article by Frieda Toth Looking back, it was ludicrous. I took a motor scooter on a solo trip through the Adirondacks, re-creating the trip of the beautiful and adventurous Bond girl in Ian Fleming’s lesser-known thriller The Spy Who Loved Me. I primitive tented by the river, I befriended a bunch of Harley riders, and…
The twelfth volume in The Folio Society’s spectacular and best-selling James Bond series, The Man with the Golden Gun sees the world’s greatest super spy tackle his most dangerous assignment. For The Man with the Golden Gun, series artist Fay Dalton returns with her incomparable vision of Bond and his glamorous, deadly and action-packed world. This gorgeous edition…
Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about James Bond or his creator, Ian Fleming, comes Bond Behind the Iron Curtain by James Fleming (Ian Fleming’s nephew) which looks at the world’s most famous secret agent from a completely different angle: through the eyes of the communist bloc. Even before the film…
Article by Jim Wright “The license to kill for the Secret Service, the double-o prefix, was a great honor. It had been earned hardly. It brought Bond the only assignments he enjoyed, the dangerous ones.” — Ian Fleming, Dr. No No Time to Die, the upcoming James Bond movie, marks the…
Review by Jeffrey Susla It appears that with each generation, a new biography of Ian Fleming is published. In 1966, two years after Fleming’s death, John Pearson, a colleague of Fleming’s at The Sunday Times, wrote The Life of Ian Fleming. Pearson, to whom all Fleming fans are deeply indebted, interviewed over 150 individuals associated…
Article by Dick Woodgate As if in a nod to James Bond the ornithologist, Fleming’s short story, For Your Eyes Only, begins with a detailed description of a Caribbean humming bird before moving on to describe a colonial scene in Fleming’s beloved Jamaica (A little Easter egg here: The Blue Harbor Hotel is mentioned in…
Article by Oliver Buckton One of the most puzzling questions about Ian Fleming’s career as an author is why it took him so long after the end of World War II to write the first James Bond novel. During the war, his service in the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) as assistant to DNI Admiral John…
Article by Julian Parrott I don’t consider myself an author, but I may now describe myself as a writer. After thirty-plus years of producing the kind of administrative writing familiar across offices everywhere, I recently took the leap into creative fiction (although some colleagues could say that some of my admin memos and reports could…
Article by F. L. Toth Ian Fleming might not sing it out the way they did, but a good case can be made that Ian, like the Schuyler sisters, thought New York City was the “greatest city in the world.” Just look at how much space he devoted to it. Bond is known for jetting…
This year’s SAMLA 2021 conference is the theme of “Social Networks/Social Distances,” and they are inviting paper proposals on any aspects of Bond, Fleming, and Networks. This could include the way James Bond interacts with and/or distances from various spy networks, such as the Soviet noir SMERSH, the international terror organization SPECTRE, and the Cambridge…
By Gerald Wadsworth Today marks the anniversary of Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun, in which we find Bond on an assignment to the Caribbean to locate and eliminate Francisco (Paco) “Pistols” Scaramanga – a freelance assassin for Castro. “What to paint?”… This artistic conundrum happens a lot with Bond… even after five…
Richard Chopping was a British writer and painter, best known as the original illustrator of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, including From Russia with Love and Goldfinger – a commission that had been declined by his former friend and subsequent arch-rival, Lucien Freud. His distinctive style and immaculate mastery of tromp l’oeil led Fleming – who was a…
The eleventh volume in The Folio Society’s spectacular James Bond series sees the agent fighting not only for his life, but for his very livelihood. The last book to be published before Fleming died, You Only Live Twice contains everything that makes a Bond novel so thrilling: exotic locations, glamorous women, grotesque villains – while…
By Jim Wright Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966), the last of Ian Fleming’s 14 novels and short story collections, is often considered the least of the lot. After all, the first edition weighs in at just 95 pages, and the title seems increasingly off-putting. That’s a shame because the two short stories of the…
Article by Frieda Toth (an abridged lecture originally for the SAMLA92 conference). It is amazing to me, in light of Bond’s tomcatting around, that so little attention is paid to his creator’s attitudes toward reproductive freedom. Although he might have resisted the labels at the time, Fleming’s work is unashamedly pro choice and pro reproductive…
Article by Jeffrey Susla In a 2011 article for The Spectator, Kate Grimond (Ian Fleming’s niece) eloquently writes how Fleming’s only story for children finally appeared in illustrated print. In “The tale of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” Grimond notes that the young Ian Fleming stayed at Higham Park in Surrey, where he learned stories about how Louis Zborowski’s…
To round off the year that was 2020, Gerald Wadsworth brings some colour to our lives in his latest homage to James Bond! A writer is always looking for some literary device to give their characters their own “voice” as well as an identity that will differentiate them from the other characters in the book.…
Artistic Licence Renewed 