“We have all the time in the world,” James Bond tells his new bride Tracy in 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” both moments before and after she dies at the hand of Bond’s nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofield. Unfortunately, like Tracy, Bond’s creator—a brilliant, troubled, complex writer who died at 56—never had as much time as he, or we might have liked.
This is the first biography authorized by the Fleming estate. It gave English writer Nicholas Shakespeare unprecedented access to his subject’s correspondence and to his remaining living family members and friends. In Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an engrossing and definitive biography, we encounter the man in full, contradictions and all.
Fleming’s compatriots remember him as a “moody, harsh and withdrawn person, habitually rude and often cruel,” “the most generous, least malicious, most merry, yet most melancholy man I ever knew,” “most emphatically not a snob” (his wife, Ann), “a real snob” (Sean Connery), “completely and utterly irresistible to women,” and someone whom “nine out of ten women couldn’t stand.” How could one person contain such multitudes?
The British Intelligence Machine
Shakespeare begins by examining the Fleming clan’s paterfamilias, Robert, a wildly successful self-made financier. Robert Fleming rose out of Scottish lowland poverty in the late 19th century, founding an important bank in the City of London. He conducted business with J.P. Morgan and other titans.
His son Valentine, Ian’s father, joined the upwardly mobile and self-abnegating fin-de-siecle English striving class, attending Eton, befriending Churchill’s younger brother
