Nicholas

One of the great biographies

Revisado: 10-16-24

This is one of the great biographies. It is set within a Bayeux tapestry peopled by the heroes and cads, the clever and ghastly women at the top of England as the country toppled through its last two dreadful wars into a grumbling little island north of Europe. Massive quantities of alcohol and expensive tobacco, heroism, and dirty tricks, with James Bond stepping unstoppably through false starts and lawsuits. A remarkable book, wonderfully well-paced and -written. It gets 5.0 top of the class in every section and deserves extra stars for length: just under 30 Audible hours of often faster than the original Bonds.

Once past Ian Fleming's childhood, ropey Eton days, and first grimy couple of years of being bullied by rich mummy, it takes off through the heart of 20th century London and New York. It flies in a constant commando raid on the upper crusty heart of the top of London social politics, English spying and dirty tricks real and imaginary, the imaginary, usually more important, flowering into the fantastic-Orwellian world of Dr. No, Smersh, To Russia With Love, the giggling collapse of a sad Empire.
In 'Ian Fleming, ' Nicholas S describes a Pepysian diarist –the combinations of idiocy and clear-eyed heroism –the death of Fleming’s father in 1917 Flanders. No one who was anyone, male and female in London is not here: an incredibly rich Anglo-Peruvian, Winston Churchill, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and David Cornwell. A driving page-by-page account of real-life sex and violence with names, dates, and times, scrupulously researched and dated.

Nicholas Shakespeare turns every fast-paced page with ease and well-judged indiscretion, indeed kindness, how Fleming, a wartime spy chieftain and then top London newspaper executive, at last, got round to writing the Bond books, starting with Casino Royal in 1953. The first four did not make, to begin with, much of a splash in London and even less in New York. When they did take off, thanks to a plug from President Kennedy, they became a rocket constantly refueled and, after splashdown relaunched, innately powerful producing, in Nicholas S's book, a constant stream of well-turned quotes enlivening pages already crammed with emotional and political action. Fleming would be dead only 11 years later at 56.

“Ian Fleming'' is a supercharged open-topped Bentley Thunderbird cruising surehanded through the hearts and livers of the Anglo 20th century, the swerves and wrong turnings, dead ends of history. This is how things happen. Beware of being rich and successful, of a winning streak. May the gods protect you from hitting the jackpot.

N. Asheshov

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Five Golden Stars

Revisado: 12-13-17

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Into The Silence weighs in at half the length of War and Peace and is on the same huge scale. The unimaginable killing and maiming in the 1914-18 trenches of the Western Front in the words, the descriptions of some of the British officers and medics who lived through the daily slaughter. It takes these Brits of the old school, plus an occasional Canadian and Australian, and tells the story of how between 1921 and 1924, having survived against the odds the trenches, went on to attempt to climb Everest, which in those days lay weeks beyond the railhead over unknown Tibet.

A compulsive page-turner, I emerged from days of engrossed isolation in the exploding trenches, lying in a hurricane-blown old tent on the North Col at 23,000 ft about to be ripped 10,000 ft below onto the such-and-such glacier. I had frostbite and had lost my icepick.

The foreground is the stuffy world of upper-class Cambridge, London and the Raj of the first two decades of the 20th century. The climbers of Everest with at most feeble sprays of oxygen were the same boys, now disillusioned, who were mowed down, blown up, and bayoneted in the trenches, who built and were running the world’s greatest empire.

Into The Silence is among the great books already of the 21st Century, a hundred years on from the events it relates, superbly, coolly put together and written by Wade Davis, today a Prof of Anthropology at UBC Vancouver. Davis, a well-known Amazon explorer, was for many years the Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC. If you look him up on TED you will find a couple of fast, chatty talks on the disappearing worlds of the Tropics, the Deserts, the Arctic. Five golden stars.

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