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“... took place in Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two brothers they had ...”

“... the Rothermeres, who owned the Daily Mail. (He painted a portrait of Ann Rothermere, who married Ian Fleming in 1952.) He got to meet Garbo and dance with Margot Fonteyn and socialise with Princess Margaret. He got to disappear into the night with Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met in a club. ‘He enjoyed the perks of being an artist,’ Feaver ...”

“... they can’t get on with them. (I first came across this crack in a biography of the womanising Ian Fleming, who knew and cordially loathed Freud – who loathed him back.) François Mauriac, in his great novel of literary envy, Ce qui était perdu, puts it more subtly and tellingly: ‘The more women a man knows, the more rudimentary becomes the idea ...”

“... elsewhere in German society. But as the best study of public opinion in the Third Reich, that of Ian Kershaw on Bavaria, a traditionally anti-semitic area, tells us with grim precision, to the population as a whole the massacre of the Jews ‘was of no more than minimal interest’. Anti-semitism was a force, not one of the strongest ones, in political ...”

“... secret codes’. In exchange, the FBI turned a ‘blind eye to British activities on US soil’. Ian Fleming, posted to Washington, didn’t take to Hoover – ‘a chunky enigmatic man with slope eyes and a trap of a mouth’. British intelligence generally considered him out of his depth, if sufficiently discreet to be trusted with secrets.When ...”

“... I’m not sure these evidences are volunteered with an eye to their vulgarity, and there is an Ian Fleming-like knowingness about him – the best place to stay, the shop to buy shirts etc. Bellow’s presentation of vulgarity itself vulgar? But maybe I’m missing something here and it’s all part of Bellow’s take on Bloom. In the past it’s ...”

“... which some English newspaper does not make an apocryphal reference to the lost explorer,’ Peter Fleming (brother of Ian) wrote in the early 1930s. ‘Fresh rumours are always coming in, fresh expeditions are always on the point of starting.’ Fleming was himself part of one, and wrote ...”

“... was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air travel was assumed to be a ...”

“... at his story of how, on assignment in Jamaica covering Prime Minister Eden’s convalescence at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye (‘I knew the house because my eldest brother Shane’s widow was now married to Fleming’), he resolved to prevent a fellow correspondent making the disastrous mistake of marrying their ...”

“... Adventure?’ the young travelogue aspirant ventured to ask, to be crisply told that Peter Fleming’s book had sold as an adventure, not as a book about Brazil. Fleming’s two prewar travel books, the Brazilian one and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively ...”

“... there were a couple of titles by Ngaio Marsh, a batch of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming and an incomplete, untouched set of Dickens in pale blue cloth bindings. Nobody went near the Dickens – Colin, a reader of contemporary paperbacks only, declared a hatred of him for his infatuation with the poor and his longwindedness. Maureen ...”

“... in Maugham’s presence. On another occasion, Maugham ‘gave him an icy stare’ as Ann Fleming – wife of Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you ...”

“... Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at hand. It generated another set of forms ...”