Learn Something New Every Day – 5 Facts about Bond
- James Bond author, Ian Fleming, got the idea for the name for his 007 agent, James Bond, from the author of a book of Jamaican birds that he kept near his desk.
- The fictional James Bond of the novels was not super-handsome or super-smooth. He was cold and highly trained. In Fleming’s own words, ‘an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government department’.
- Fleming claimed that Bond was an amalgam of the intelligence agents and commandos he’d known from World War Two. Others have claimed that he represents Reilly (‘Ace of Spies’) or his own latent desires to have a more adventurous military role (Fleming was never able to join active military on health grounds and his eventual job within the Military was to fabricate very complex, clever–and entirely fake–military missions that were used for counter intelligence).
- Soviets were irked at not having a communist counterpart to beat James Bond so they commissioned a Bulgarian writer to write a novel in which a communist super spy bests Bond.
- Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for his son, about a car developed by a wealthy friend.
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