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“... I see the name of Penelope Fitgerald – not, however, to be found in the body of the book. Why Ian Fleming and not, say, Gavin Ewart? Why Alfred Noyes and not Olivia Manning? Why not both A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Doubtless for all sorts of reasons. Why Tannhäuser and not Parsifal? Why summarise The Shaving of Shagpat and not Living or ...”

“... War from Barcelona (where he gets drunk with Hemingway), is recruited to Naval Intelligence by Ian Fleming and dispatched to Portugal to spy on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, becomes a prisoner of war in Switzerland, takes a job running an art gallery in New York (which brings him into contact with de Kooning and Pollock), gets caught up in the ...”

“... You must explain to me why Cyril wants Barbara,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming in September 1955, a year after Barbara Skelton’s marriage to Cyril Connolly had formally ended. ‘It’s not as though she were rich or a good housekeeper or the mother of his children.’ The following year Edmund Wilson asked Connolly, now two years into his divorce, why he didn’t get someone else ...”

“... appropriate than was perhaps intentional. Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby ... ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story ... Yuri Modin ...”

“... the Barthes of Mythologies (but with rather less wit), Eco explores the narrative devices of Ian Fleming and the emotional significance of the Superman comics. He also pays attention to modern music, to the once popular melodramas of Eugène Sue, and in the piece which enunciates his latest theoretical advances, to a literary joke by Allais, culled ...”

“... talk of the real thing. Here at last was the mean, lethal, almost banter-free figure we thought Ian Fleming had invented, the ruthless, funless fellow we imagined we had always wanted. He had a licence to kill but his real licence was his angry work ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert ...”

“... in Piers Court, where he corresponds with wealthy, witty ladies (Mitford takes turns with Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper) who keep him au fait with the doings of vile bodies in the world from which he has withdrawn. The postal service is so good that a letter from Mitford in postwar Paris telling of the latest liaison dangereuse can be on his desk the next ...”

“... Acker had appropriated and re-ordered the writing of others – Harold Robbins or Cervantes or Ian Fleming or Propertius. Recently, on the radio, Leslie Dick remarked that Kathy Acker’s writing was an extension of her reading, that her plagiarism was a way of reading, or rereading, appropriating and customising what she read, writing herself, so to ...”

“... As an example of this kind of text, he cited the James Bond novels. Eco’s approach to Ian Fleming in this book was welcome for its critical gusto and its sense that he had really enjoyed the novels (by a sweet irony, Sean Connery would later take the lead in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film of The Name of the Rose). But he ...”

“... pleasure, a belief that ‘the present moment’s all my lott,’ and a conviction, reminiscent of Ian Fleming, that ‘there’s something genrous in meer lust’. Lust, he thought, was: That cordiall dropp Heav’n in our cup has throwne, To make the nauseous draught of life goe downe. There is no need to doubt the energy of Rochester’s ...”

“... we love to hate, and even the villain of the time-honoured attributes found in Buchan or Sapper or Ian Fleming. These last are by no means despised by Powell’s art, and in Henchman they take the well-known form of extreme loquacity. The main tactic and enjoyment of such a villain is to expound his plans for world conquest or whatever to a captive ...”

“... were supposed to be able to mix easily with diplomats and foreign ministers. In 1933 the Etonian Ian Fleming – ‘his appearance is good, and his manners are agreeable’ – covered the show trials in Moscow of the Vickers engineers. ‘Moscow, Wednesday. As the famous clock on the Kremlin Tower strikes 12 the six Metropolitan-Vickers English ...”

“... avoiding bad language and the ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ he denounced in practitioners like Ian Fleming. His characters were never clubland heroes. He cared as little for literary critics as he did for those publishers’ editors, on both sides of the Atlantic, who were anxious to improve his none-too-elegant style and even to tighten up his ...”

“... mean James Bond, the author of Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, whose name appealed to Ian Fleming as he cast around for something to call 007. Both men spent time in the Caribbean. They met in 1964, and Fleming handed Bond a copy of You Only Live Twice, inscribed: ‘To the real James Bond from the thief of ...”

“... its components being carefully itemised. Product names litter the text as thickly as in any Ian Fleming. The author is Japanese, fluent, it seems, in both English and French; like John Murray, she is alive to those periods of adjustment and stress when cultures meet. There are some nicely-judged moments of wry humour when Asako meets those who wish ...”