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“... line – of the ‘very flat, Norfolk’ variety – in encapsulating personality. She found Ian Fleming ‘rather boring’, the future King Edward VIII a man of ‘wide-ranging interests’, and Norman Mailer, who married her elder daughter, ‘dynamic’ Her attendance at the 1936 Olympics enables her to tell us that Hitler had clammy hands, and ...”

“... a need to publicise. In Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), Ian Hamilton quotes Brooke’s Rugby and Cambridge friend Geoffrey Keynes on the underlying causes of the Eddie-Ranee stand-off: Brooke’s unmanly physical beauty was often taken as an indication that he was probably a homosexual … It had, of course, been far ...”

“... childhood, of his own family stories (‘autobiography re-experienced as fairytale’, as Ian Hamilton put it). The exaggerations and magical touches are rooted in the characters and the story. Shame (1983), a savage satire about Pakistan, is a less personal and less peopled work, with a clear political message at its heart. But both, although baggy ...”

“... Wilson (whom he once used to trump the BBC’s religious broadcasting department in a turf war), Ian Fleming and John Osborne. The bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, surrounded by Arab boys, camp churchmen and Beverley Nichols, takes the credit for widening Betjeman’s horizons, leading him and Elizabeth Cavendish regularly abroad in a group that ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars ...”

“... in a fossil or the bark of a tree.’ Another late jewel in his crown was the little fantasy on Ian Fleming, ‘Bond Strikes Camp’, whose humour has the subtle approval and understanding of all first-class parody. Connolly’s writing was hero-worshipped at this time by the up and coming young Ken Tynan, who referred to his idol as the Supreme ...”

“... a conoisseur’s pleasure in high life as well as in the seamy side, becoming a close friend of Ian Fleming, with whom he worked in the war on Naval Intelligence. Each of them, as Alexander remarks, ‘was a great collector of characters’. Perhaps because he was an outsider from South Africa, Plomer suffered from none of the social anxieties that ...”

“... it did, as if the detective’s story were as ‘real’ as the Japanese attack on Shanghai. In an Ian Fleming-like coup de théâtre a trusted uncle turns out to be the head of an opium smuggling organisation. A close childhood friend, now a wounded soldier in the invading army, is met and cared for. Since the climax of the action occurs during the ...”

“... with the Grub Street Mephistopheles: he stays the same whatever he writes. A Greene, though, or an Ian Fleming, may have to become what he writes, exemplify his own formula, with results that affect himself and others. Interestingly, unlike the cases of Shakespeare or Pushkin, the work of Greene or Fleming, and its ...”

“... and removed his quotation from ‘the sex-and-violence literature’ of James Hadley Chase and Ian Fleming: he substituted writing of his own, not guying these offensive writers, but carefully imitating them, in pastiches which few recognised to be imitation – since Hoggart’s point was, partly, that such writers have power and skill. Hoggart is an ...”

“... of one of Chandler’s plots make the twist ending foreseeable, it’s preceded by an unexpected, Ian Fleming-like sequence with a turn from a violent butler. Banville has some fun giving Clare an Irish background. ‘Look at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of ...”

“... a reputation in Whitehall as a generous luncheon host and found a new circle of friends, including Ian Fleming and at least one duke (Bond’s enthusiasm for luxury brands seems to owe something to Wheatley’s style). He proudly related that the king, a professed fan of his fiction, had asked to see a copy of every report he wrote: all in all, a good ...”

“... but slowly over a period of time’. Evans then quotes from a letter Lewis afterwards wrote to Ian Fleming, who as an editor (or, as he preferred, ‘foreign manager’) on the Sunday Times had sent Lewis to Cuba. ‘There was something biblical about the meeting with Hemingway,’ Lewis wrote, like having the old sermon on the vanities shoved down ...”

“... had been executed in 1831, however, and none of Ainsworth’s readers took up his invitation. Ian Fleming had been a secret agent, and was in part his own model for Bond. Ainsworth, the eldest son of a wealthy Manchester lawyer, had spent his childhood reading about highwaymen, but was no highwayman himself, though he had Turpin’s contempt for ...”

“... described by the selector-cataloguers of his panoramic exhibition at the Tate, Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, as ‘for later generations the very epitome of Romantic landscape painting’. It was the most derelict, most desolate scene Constable ever pictured, with its ruined pair of towers set beside an endless flat expanse of land and sea and ...”