Ian Fleming

You didn’t mess with them – the doughty matriarchs of the intelligence world

2 November 2024 9:00 am

Claire Hubbard-Hall pays tribute to the legions of women who devoted their lives to the British secret service but whose efforts went largely unacknowledged

James Bond and the Beatles at war for Britain’s soul

17 September 2022 9:00 am

‘Better use your sense,’ advised Bob Dylan: ‘take what you have gathered from coincidence.’ John Higgs is a master of…

Mostly gripping – and boasts not one but two Mr Darcys: Operation Mincemeat reviewed

16 April 2022 9:00 am

Operation Mincemeat is based on the book by Ben Macintyre, which in turn is based on what Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper…

What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s

18 December 2021 9:00 am

Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…

It’s time for James Bond to die

30 September 2021 9:09 am

I saw the new James Bond last night, but after reading today’s reviews I’m not sure I watched the same…

Audiences don’t want woke: comic-book writer Mark Millar interviewed

8 May 2021 9:00 am

James Delingpole talks to comic-book writer Mark Millar about the joy of Catholicism, our sorry lack of male action figures and his childhood superpower

Diary

21 October 2017 9:00 am

New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Raleigh, Dallas… I’m on a book tour in Donald Trump’s USA, which feels much like the…

Donald Trump is an awkward ginger snob – and he owes me £20

7 May 2016 9:00 am

I am no admirer of Donald Trump — not because he is a doomsayer and professional patriot but because he…

Tom Hiddlestone is The Night Manager

BBC1’s The Night Manager verges on parody

27 February 2016 9:00 am

The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’…

Yuri Gagarin in the cabin of Vostok, the spacecraft in which he made the first human journey to outer space on 12 April, 1961

When technology was art: Cosmonauts at the Science Museum reviewed

26 September 2015 8:00 am

‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared…

Middle-England Gothic: Anna Maxwell-Martin as Merrily Watkins in Midwinter of the Spirit

ITV’s Midwinter of the Spirit is a satisfying example of Middle-England Gothic

26 September 2015 8:00 am

For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’…

The trials of living with a High Court judge

29 August 2015 9:00 am

This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s…

Peter and Ian Fleming as boys at Joyce Grove (Peter is on the left)

Ian Fleming: cruel? Selfish? Misogynistic? Nonsense, says his step-daughter

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Between the brothers Peter and Ian Fleming, Fionn Morgan wonders who was the better writer and who the better man

James Bond's secret: he's Jamaican

9 August 2014 9:00 am

Lewis Jones on Ian Fleming’s Jamaican retreat and the inspiration it provided for the Bond novels

James Bond, author

14 December 2013 9:00 am

Matthew Woodcock reminds us that 007 was a man of letters too