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:…
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,…
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…
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 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…
Article by Igor Solarisov “‘Dig that T-bird!’ I had cut it a bit fine round Queen Victoria’s skirts and my wing mirror had almost dashed the Leica from the GI’s hand. If the tourists don’t snap the Queen, at about 10 a.m. on most mornings they can at least get a picture of me and…
An extraordinary collection of Ian Fleming manuscripts, first editions and ephemera go under the hammer at Sotheby’s on October 28th, 2020. The collection is entitled ‘James Bond: A Collection of Books and Manuscripts, The Property of a Gentleman‘ Of particular interest in this archive of treasure, relates to the dust-jacket of For Your Eyes Only, which…
Review by Jeffrey Susla While Matt Sherman’s Playing Games With James Bond comes in at a modest 132 pages, it ranks with the best of the Bond trivia books. Sherman, an expert on collecting James Bond memorabilia and organizer of several Bond collector weekends, has created what Rosa Klebb would call, a “labour of love”…
Review by Jeffrey Susla Ian Fleming found much pleasure in drinking. That much is obvious when encountering the attention paid to the variety of drinks that James Bond orders around the world on assignment. And James Bond, like his creator, finds solace in alcohol. In Thunderball, Bond’s medical report states that he drinks half a…
![Red Grant by © George Almond [courtesy of www.007magazine.com]](https://literary007.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/1148830_10151614947083106_339189802_n.jpg?w=220&h=126&crop=1)
It’s no accident that the best novels often have the best villains, and in Ian Fleming’s canon, this is no different. They lay bare humanity’s worst traits and push Bond’s resourcefulness to the nth degree. Only the greatest authors make the pulses of all of us beat faster, and they do this by marrying the…
The dust jackets of the first three James Bond novels are well known to any serious first edition collector. Their seminal influence and value are most talked about, but less well known is the man behind the artwork, Kenneth Lewis. Someone who knew the late Lewis well is rare book dealer and long-time Ian Fleming…
James Bond will never have a reputation in the intelligence or spy writer community as being a great spy. He was a secret agent with a license to kill, should he need to use it. This is not to say that Bond does not do any intelligence gathering or was not skilled in counter-intelligence. But…
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…
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…
Artistic Licence Renewed 