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“... on Beaverbrook, Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Jonathan Dimbleby on his father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get ...”

“... and the formidable Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral Godfrey, and his assistant Ian Fleming. Their meetings must have been fun. Godfrey, brilliant but acerbic, called the RAF the Royal Advertisement Service, and dismissed the Army as the ‘evacuees’, the people the Navy had had to fish out of the sea at Dunkirk, Crete and ...”

“... cycles, and having passed from tragedy to romantic comedy they whirled on into farce. A fling with Ian Fleming ended badly when he accidentally double-booked her in his house in Jamaica with his wife, Ann. ‘She was unbelievably rude to me,’ Lehmann noted, hurt. Fleming’s attempt to amuse her by throwing a live ...”

“... revivals. Fans wouldn’t let James Bond decently retire the service with the death of his creator Ian Fleming, but kept him going for an increasingly dreary series of adventures by John Gardner. For the fan, once is never enough. King’s The Tommyknockers has many familiar aspects to it, not least that it’s over 550 pages long and seems destined to ...”

“... he liked to play two rounds of golf a day, to keep his handicap down to ten (about the same as Ian Fleming and better than P.G. Wodehouse). On the links at North Berwick, when he made a bad shot, he would turn away and gaze over the Forth and then turn round again, smiling. At times he sounds like a fully paid-up member of the Drones club. No ...”

“... and sordid, of respectable diplomacy. Jeremy was the first person I came across who admired Ian Fleming, and I still have an edition of Live And Let Die that he plucked from the ex libris shelf of Boots Library for a shilling in 1956 and presented to me on the spot. Two other things were in the air – death and drink, which in Jeremy’s case went ...”

“... invented the phrase ‘snobbery with violence’ to describe the school of Sapper and Buchan (and Ian Fleming, for that matter), but then I was told it had been used before, but where and in what circumstances I have forgotten. The form of Forty Years On is more complicated than I would dream of attempting now. It is a play within a play in which the ...”

“... complexity. Everything between Tolstoy on the one side and honestly unserious Wodehouse or Ian Fleming, say, on the other – Waugh, Greene, Joyce, you name it – will have for him something of the status of kitsch or poshlost, will be fundamentally untrue, in some way. The problem for the critic is not just that the Tolstoyan or Shakespearean or ...”

“... where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne Campbell, the daughter of the 11th duke of Argyll, went on to have an affair with Fidel Castro. Anne and Colin got engaged. Her father was annoyed ...”

“... known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this ...”

“... he wanted someone to cook him his lunch.Over these years he met his literary heroes Hemingway, Ian Fleming and C.S. Forester, and tried, with the encouragement of Forester, to kick-start his own automatic grammatisator and sell stories to periodicals. In the short stories from the mid-1950s he got onto the marketable trick of embedding tropes from ...”

“... handicap of six makes him superior to other obsessive literary golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter ...”

“... crossover between Kennedy’s Mobbed-up sex-life and his thuggish foreign policy. Recall that Ian Fleming was one of his favourite authors. Bill Clinton has shown himself promiscuous about things like campaign finance and also about things like women met in a hurry along the trail. The two things may bear only an allegorical relationship. A baffled ...”

“... Eliot). As a reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the ...”

“... provided my father and his friends with endless entertainment – they speculated that since Ian Fleming, another school chum, remained a close friend of the Burglar’s, his hero James Bond had assumed some of the Burglar’s charms – and his methods.A desire​ to be foreign, so marked in the passion for costume and for pretending to be ...”