Ian Fleming created one of the great twentieth century icons in James Bond, a character whose global cultural impact still informs our age. Fleming himself was often conflated with Bond in the public’s mind—not always favorably: an oft-caricatured man’s man and complicated lover of women with an adventurous, if shrouded, past.
A colleague called him, “The most generous, least malicious, most merry yet most melancholy man I ever knew.” In "Ian Fleming: The Complete Man," literary biographer and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare takes a deep dive into the life of the man who alone could have created James Bond, providing a fresh portrait of contradictions that draws on never-before-accessed private archives. We welcome Nicholas Shakespeare to the RT.