Ian Fleming: The Complete Man By Nicholas Shakespeare

The decolonization of the British Empire throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties brought particular attention to Ian Fleming’s famous debonair spy, James Bond. Shakespeare, a novelist and biographer, details Fleming’s own rise to stardom (his irritated wife called him the “oldest Beatle"), alert to the politics that infused his life and work. Fleming first tried journalism, then finance, faring poorly at both. In 1939 Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, John Henry Godfrey, tapped Fleming to be his assistant. The usual thing to say about Fleming’s intelligence work is that he was a deskbound underling who turned his daydreams into spy novels, but Shakespeare presents evidence of Fleming’s centrality. One officer felt that it was Fleming, not Godfrey, who effectively directed naval intelligence for most of the Second World War. Fleming emerged in his spy fiction as the voice of a beleaguered empire but could never quite deal with the way America was eclipsing Britain as a world power.