Ian Fleming: Licence to Kill
By Nigel Cawthorne
There have been many different James Bonds. Seven actors have played him in the official movies alone, and everyone has their favourite. But there was only one Ian Fleming.
While Fleming was very conscious that his Bond books were pure fantasy, he insisted that everything within them had its foundation in reality.
All the gadgets – in the books at least – he had come across in the war. The contacts he had made in the British intelligence services and the CIA also proved vital, and many of the plotlines mimic wartime operations he himself had planned.
How true is James Bond’s character to Ian Fleming?
And what shaped the man who created the stories that have thriller the world for the last fifty years?