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Seventy years ago, in 1953, Ian Fleming, a British WWII planner and supervisor for commandos, published a brief espionage novel, Casino Royale, and thus James Bond was born. The book allowed Fleming to reimagine British imperial greatness and continue in fiction his command over manly men willing and able to kill and die for a cause, for the thrill of the fight, and for pride. He could speak for civilized society’s necessary assassins.By the use of his imagination, Fleming became far more successful and important than he had ever been in public service. He ended up orchestrating one of Britain’s...

April 13, 1953 was a red letter the day in popular culture. It was when Ian Fleming’s debut novel, Casino Royale, was published, and the world was introduced to James Bond. The success of Casino Royale in the U.K. paved the way for subsequent works by Fleming, featuring Bond. In 1961, President Kennedy named 'From Russia With Love' as one of his top ten favorite books in Life magazine. This endorsement made the book a bestseller in the U.S. Some say it was Kennedy's way of linking himself to Bond and projecting himself as a Bond-like heroic leader taking on...

James Bond novels including Casino Royale and Octopussy have been edited to suit modern sensibilities with a raft of racist and sexist terms removed ahead of the 70th anniversary of 007 this year. The publishers of the books by Bond creator Ian Fleming commissioned a review by ‘sensitivity readers’ to modernise them, according to the Sunday Telegraph... In the new version of Bond novel Live And Let Die, a scene in which Bond visits a New York club is altered to remove reference to a striptease. In the 1954 original it says: ‘Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting...

A first edition copy of Ian Fleming’s 007 novel Goldfinger, inscribed by the author to legendary golfer Sir Henry Cotton, could fetch a record price at auction. The 1959 book features a famous golf match between James Bond and Auric Goldfinger in which the secret agent wins $10,000 from the villain after both use underhand tactics to win. Fleming, who described the grudge match over 21 pages in his novel, presented the inscribed copy to his friend, the three-time Open champion Sir Henry, who was a fellow member at the Royal St George’s golf club in Kent. Inside the 63-year-old...

**SNIP** After mentioning the Sony emails and telling his listeners who Elba is, Limbaugh said, “Here’s the thing, though… James Bond is a fictional character, obviously. James Bond was invented, created by Ian Fleming… and James Bond is… white and Scottish. Period. That is who James Bond is.” “But now Sony is suggesting that the next James Bond should be Idris Elba, a black Briton rather than a white from Scotland,” continued Limbaugh. “But that’s NOT who James Bond is, and I know it’s racist to probably even point this out… We had 50 years of white Bonds because Bond...

The 007 Movie Villains Disconnect with Reality During a recent visit to the Imperial War Museum in London, as I examined the Secret Service exhibits, I could not help but notice the sharp contrast between the villains depicted in James Bond 007 films and the real enemies of the Realm. • KGB Infiltrators Although MI5 and MI6 were riddled with high level KGB infiltrators, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Harry Houghton, John Cairncross, George Blake, Donald Maclean, Geoffrey Prime, Anthony Blunt and Sir Roger Hollis, no 007 film has really tackled that reality. That M, at the time of the early...

He’s best remembered as the creator of James Bond, but before he became a successful author, Ian Fleming was a man of many parts. Something of a playboy in his younger years, he was a traveller and a linguist before he worked as a journalist and a stockbroker in the 1930s. At the outbreak of war, Ian Lancaster Fleming was commissioned as a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Intelligence Division, and worked at the Admiralty directly under the Director of Naval Intelligence Admiral John Godfrey. It was a role he found he had remarkable aptitude for, and he was to...

'He was best known for battling the Daleks as one of the best-loved Doctor Whos. But now it has been revealed that Jon Pertwee was a real-life secret agent years before he donned the Time Lord’s cape. The actor, who died in 1996 aged 76, was a senior intelligence agent during the Second World War and reported directly to Winston Churchill. He was also recommended for another role by James Bond creator Ian Fleming – and proved to be an expert in using a range of 007-like gadgets, including a smoking pipe that fired bullets and handkerchiefs containing secret maps....

Date: Aug. 19, 1942 Time: 5 a.m. Location: A stone beach on the northern coast of France. Operation: More than 6,000 Allied forces infantrymen attempt to penetrate a German stronghold. Outcome: Unmitigated disaster. Less than six hours later, 60 per cent of the infantrymen were dead, injured and/or captured; 907 Canadians died. Why the Allied forces allowed the poorly planned Dieppe Raid to move forward has been a mystery for decades - until now. Montreal historian David O'Keefe has solved the mystery and, in the process, has rewritten a defining moment in military history. O'Keefe, a military historian by profession,...

The Aokigahara Forest is a lonely place to die. So dense is the vegetation at the foot of Japan's Mount Fuji, it is all too easy to disappear among the evergreens and never be seen again. Each year the authorities remove as many as 100 bodies found hanging at the country's suicide hotspot - but others can lie undiscovered for years. Exactly why so many choose to end their lives in the forest remains something of a mystery, though it has been suggested that the first among them were inspired by a novel set there. Azusa Hayano has studied and...

George Robert Lazenby was born on September 5, 1939 in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia.

It's still spy author vs. spy. Famed espionage writer John Le Carré remains no fan of James Bond, the martini-loving super spy created by Ian Fleming. "I dislike Bond. I'm not sure that Bond is a spy," the "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" author said in 1966, during a BBC interview that will be re-broadcast next week. Today, the 78-year-old Le Carré told the Radio Times that while he may have been harsh 40 years ago, he's still not sure Bond is much of a spy. "At the root of Bond there was something neo-fascistic and totally materialist," said Le Carré,...

The destruction of a Russian hideout at SHAPE headquarters near Paris; the planned assassination of a Cuban thug in America; the tracking of a heroin ring from Rome to Venice and beyond; for Bond it is just routine. For anyone else - certain death.

By Christmas of 1964, nowhere was safe for thirty-four-year-old Sean Connery. It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 2 minutes and 44 seconds. Pretitle Sequence “This Never Happened to the other Fellar” Maurice Binder’s Title Sequence The Real James Bond, George Lazenby (Born 09-05-1939) Diana Rigg (born 07-30-1938) as the Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo Telly Savalas (01-21-1922 – 01-22-1994) as Ernst Starvo Blofeld Rest of the Cast Gabriele Ferzetti as Marc-Ange Draco - Head of the Union Corse, a major crime syndicate and Tracy's father Ilse Steppat as Irma Bunt - Blofeld's henchwoman who takes part in his quest to try and eliminate Bond. Bernard Lee as M - Head of...

Fusing together entries on Fleming’s famous 00-agent and detailed information on cases of espionage, real-life spies, MI5, SIS, CIA, KGB, and others, Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming’s James Bond asks the question: What proportion of Fleming’s output is authentic, and what comes directly from the his imagination?

The character Goldfinger may have been based on a German spymaster who plotted to blow up gold reserves at the Bank of England THE inspiration for Goldfinger, the arch villain created by Ian Fleming to rival James Bond, could have been a German spymaster who plotted to blow up gold reserves at the Bank of England. Andrew Cook, a historian who specialises in intelligence affairs, has found new evidence that suggests Auric Goldfinger’s fictional plans to destroy all the gold in Fort Knox may have been based on a conspiracy to bankrupt Britain on the eve of the first world...

By some tortured, objective filmmaking standard it might be possible to make the case that Quantum of Solace isn’t the worst James Bond film of all time, but I defy anyone to argue that it isn’t the least satisfying. After all, a bad James Bond film is still a James Bond film. There is that going for it. Invisible cars and Grace Jones have done no small amount of damage but in the smoking, campy wreckage there still lies a James Bond film. Unfortunately, in the smoking, plodding wreckage of Quantum of Solace that scrap of comfort is nowhere to...

I just returned from Casino Royal, all I can say is O U T S T A N D I N G! Don't miss seeing this on the silver screen. It was nice for the franchise to get back to basics after all of the gimmicks, bad one liners and predictable plots/scripts. The action is intense, Bond gets "shaken not stirred". He actually bleeds and has scars for quite a while after his encounters with people bent on his destruction (I don't even want to tell you what the other guys look like) and there are enough twists and turns...