For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond

Red Indian

Has anyone had a look at this yet? It's the companion piece to the exhibit at the War Museum isn't it?

Napoleon Plural

It is, yes. I was disappointed by the lack of photographs inside, it's not a very lavish or colourful publication.

Red Indian

Thanks for the information; that's too bad. I was hoping it would be good as I probably won't make it over the pond to the actual exhibit.

Maybe I'll just save up for the Roger Moore event at Pinewood in October!

superado

Napoleon Plural wrote:

It is, yes. I was disappointed by the lack of photographs inside, it's not a very lavish or colourful publication.

Ditto. Unfortunately I bought it from Amazon and therefore did not preview it as I would do at the bookstore (all because I wanted to take advantage of the pre-purchase discount! Same thing happened with my purchase of the Ultimate Indy Jones Guide, but that's another story!)

It does have a lack of photos though I reserve judgement since I don't know exactly what Fleming personal effects are on display at the IWM and for all I know, what's in the book is the totality of it all.

Macintyre caveats in the preface that he didn’t intend to duplicate Griswold’s historical documentation of Bond’s fictional world in his “Annotations and Chronologies,” which I would agree with since that book is painstakingly detailed to a “t”. However, Macintyre also included in the same caveat Chancellor’s “James Bond The Man and His World” and I disagree since he went on to state that he purposed to explore how Fleming’s life and experiences shaped the Bond character, which precisely is what Chancellor’s book was all about, except that work for me was truly original and insightful and yet credible but most important, it was excellently done. With this new book on the other hand, the Fleming insights seem like cliff note snippets of Bond/Fleming trivia that any AJB member can recite in their sleep.

Strictly an opinion, I wouldn't be surprised if Macintyre had this book in the works at the same time as Chancellor's, though that came out first. The Fleming Centenary was a good occasion to leverage, though the connection between the featured exhibit pieces and the text is too thin to support the promotional purpose stated for the book.

Kent007

I really enjoyed this book. I thought it was really interesting and really well written. Yes, the lack of photos was disappointing but I brought it to read, not to look at and as a quick 200 paged read to get over a year of English at Uni, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd recommend it.