Richard Chopping and The Butterfly Effect

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…

Birdwatcher: ‘The Real James Bond’

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…