Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is far more interesting.
He’s been mocked as a womanizing gambler and drinker who liked flogging his wife, just another bad writer of popular fiction.
But his closest friends described him as enchanting, funny, and kind.
He was fluent in German, and translated Klaus Mann in his twenties.
He worked as a journalist for Reuters, and managed the Foreign desk of The Sunday Times.
Most interesting of all is his Second World War record.
Earlier accounts described him as an obscure desk jockey, but new information reveals a man at the centre of a spider’s web, one who helped shape the future of British and Allied intelligence.
Ian Fleming’s newest biographer joined me to pull the curtain back on a truly remarkable life.
Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an excellent biography of the writer Bruce Chatwin, and many works of fiction including Stories From Other Places, The Sandpit and The Dancer Upstairs.
You can read more about Nicholas on his website, and follow him on Twitter.
We spoke about Ian Fleming’s troubled childhood, his wartime intelligence work, and how an American president made James Bond a bestseller.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
Thunderball by Ian Fleming
The Man With The Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters
We also mentioned:
Camp X by David Stafford
Goldeneye Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica by Matthew Parker
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