Article by Frieda Toth For armchair traveling, you can’t beat Bond, and there’s no more delightful pastime than retracing the steps of a fictional hero, especially knowing that there is no bad guy trying to kill you during your vacation. In 1955, Diamonds Are Forever took James Bond to Saratoga Springs, New York. Here, Bond…
Review by Revelator This is a wonderful book, a long overdue one. For anyone who cares about Ian Fleming’s work, The Man With the Golden Typewriter will be a must-have reference, deserving to rest on the same shelf as Fleming’s biographies, Kingsley Amis’s Bond Dossier, Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye, and Henry Chancellor’s James Bond: The Man…
The Man with the Golden Typewriter by Fergus Fleming, contains numerous unpublished letters by Ian Fleming, which have been sourced from the Fleming Archive, the Cape Archive and private collections from around the world On 16 August 1952, Ian Fleming wrote to his wife, Ann, ‘My love, This is only a tiny letter to try out…
Words by Edward Biddulph Ian Fleming described him as “one of the great secret agents of the last war”, and a man that “has a magnetic personality and the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth.” No, not James Bond, but Sir William Stephenson, who in 1940 on…
There is a certain paradox about James Bond’s relationship with all things America. Devoted to the Anglo-American war against Communism, there is a level of contempt that runs through the novels during a time when the British Empire was winding up and the new American one was burgeoning. The contempt tended to be about material…
Ian Fleming named his James Bond character’s CIA agent friend after Ivar Bryce’s middle name, Felix. His surname was named after another of Fleming’s friends, Tommy Leiter. Ivar Bryce was born in 1906. His father had made a fortune trading guano, the phosphate-rich deposit of fish-eating seabirds which had been widely used as a natural fertilizer.…
Artistic License Renewed was delighted to sit down with Raymond Benson to discuss his memories of Fleming’s favorite comrades Ernest Cuneo and Ivar Bryce, during the researching of his essential James Bond Bedside Companion. 1. Did Cuneo and Bryce have a favorite Fleming novel? Ernest Cuneo, it seemed to me, couldn’t have cared less about…
In August 1954 he flew to the US for research his next novel – Diamonds Are Forever – visiting Saratoga Springs after his friend, William Stephenson, sent him a magazine article about the spa town. In the US, Fleming travelled with two friends, Ivar Bryce and Ernest Cuneo, whose name was changed to ‘Ernie Cureo’ for the role of Bond’s…
Ian Fleming had many homes from home but none more so than at his great friend’s farm in southern Vermont. He used to visit his friend Ivar Bryce at Black Hole Hollow Farm right on the border between New York and Vermont. Fleming’s first visit to Vermont was to visit Bryce who he had first met…
Artistic Licence Renewed 