Article by F. L. Toth Among Bond and Fleming aficionados, it is almost as much fun to cluck our tongues affectionately at his mistakes as to delight in what Fleming does right. Fleming creates sumptuous feasts, but, some say, the author really didn’t know food all that well. His product placement is riddled with incorrectly…
This week, courtesy of the paintbrush of Gerald Wadsworth is the lesser know Ian Fleming short story “Risico”, from Ian Fleming’s short story collection For Your Eyes Only. An escape to Venice sounds ideal right now! The Inspirations In creating imagery for this painting, it seemed logical that a Venice canal scene should dominate the painting.…
Newly published by The Queen Anne Press, are the notes that John Pearson made in 1965 while researching The Life of Ian Fleming. They chart not only Fleming’s life – with details that never made it into the finished biography – but John’s own journey while investigating his subject. As such, they form less a…
Never meet your heroes they say. Well, in some cases it’s no bad thing. For Ian Fleming, it was a thrill to meet ‘the real James Bond’, whose name many argue was the inspiration for his titular hero, taken from the birding book – Birds of the West Indies. A new book about this meeting…
Article by Alice Dryden It’s a terrible thing, being a collector. You start off sensibly, with a few well-chosen items, then suddenly find yourself hoarding all kinds of tangentially-related tat. So it was that I walked past the window of one of my local charity shops, spotted a Revell 1:24 scale Bentley 4,5L Blower model…
On April 12, 2020 we lost one of the greatest racing drivers and Britons in Sir Stirling Moss aged 90. In a quite remarkable life in which Moss cheated death a few times, he crossed paths with Ian Fleming and inspired a short story that would find life again in Anthony Horowitz’s novel Trigger Mortis.…
In the dedication for Ian Fleming’s ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ it reads: ‘for SABLE BASILISK PURSUVIANT and HILARY BRAY who came to the aid of the party’ But who is Sable Basilisk? This is in fact, was based on “Rouge Dragon” in the College of Arms. Rouge Dragon was the title of heraldic researcher…
Article by Graham Thomas John Betjeman (1906 -1984) was Poet Laureate, a lover of English churches but was not a spy and, so far as is known, did not come across Fleming during the War. (Unlike other literary figures.) Eventually, he and Fleming did become good friends and while there is now little in the…
[Abridged review by Monica Germana for The World of James Bond: The Lives and Times of 007, by Jeremy Black (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, pp. 280) in the International Journal of James Bond Studies, DOI: http://doi.org/10.24877/jbs.34%5D The world has been shaken and stirred, if the pun can be excused, by a number of excellent academic…
Nobody Does It Better than the Folio Society… For this edition, The Folio Society has also reintroduced Ian Fleming’s original prologue, which had been removed from all modern editions of the text. In an unusual move by the author, this short introduction suggests that the manuscript had been left on his desk by Vivienne Michel,…
It can be argued that Sefton Delmer is the Godfather of what we commonly refer to as ‘fake news’. In old money, this was propaganda. Delmer’s “Black Propaganda,” was a disinformation war waged over the airwaves and mixed real news culled from intelligence sources and fake items. He even he produced a German-language newspaper called…
Article by F. L. Toth Ian Fleming was often criticized, sometimes rightly, for getting the facts wrong about the things for which he is best known, such as fine food, guns, wine, and bath products of all things. He seems, in fact, to have been the most annoying of dilettantes: the man who learns just…
