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Thứ Tư, 29 tháng 1, 2014

Ian Fleming - Cold War Author

By Serena Price


The Cold War describes the tense relations between the United States and the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It began with the end of the second world war and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Perhaps the best known cold war author was Ian Fleming, who was most famous for his James Bond series of fiction novels.

The Fleming family were originally from Scotland, first in Perth and then Dundee. Robert Fleming, Ian's grandfather, made a fortune in investment trusts before moving the family to London's Grosvenor Square, where they lived in a house on the site of what is occupied today as the American Embassy. Once settled in London, Robert started his own investment bank.

Valentine Fleming, Ian's father, was killed during the First World War, where he served as one of the Queen's Own (Oxfordshire) Hussars. The man who would one day be Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, who was Fleming's friend and fellow officer, penned Valentine's death notice in the paper. Prior to being killed, Valentine, a Parliament member and Barrister-at-law, married Evelyn Rose. Together they had four children, all boys.

Ian Fleming was the second of four children born to Valentine and Eve Fleming. He was born in a house in London's prestigious Mayfair in 1908, on the 28th of May. He attended Eton College and pursued further studies in western Europe. His elder brother, Peter, was born the year before him in 1907. Peter married actress Celia Johnson, who appeared in "Brief Encounter, " a film by David Lean. Richard Fleming lived from 1911 to 1977, when he perished of a cardiac ailment. The youngest Fleming boy, Michael, was born in 1913. He married and fathered four children before being killed at Normandy in the year 1940.

Ian Fleming had an early career in journalism at the Reuters news agency. During this time, he was in Oxford and was fined three guineas, or GBP 3.15 for a traffic offense. . His lawyer had to explain that he was unable to appear in court because he was attending the World Economic Conference. His years at Reuters were the most thrilling period of his life.

During his one month's unsalaried trial at Reuters, Fleming was tasked with updating 500 obituaries. This impressed his then-boss, Editor-in-Chief Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, who described him as meticulous, methodical and painstaking. It was here at Reuters that he learned how to be fast and accurate. At Reuters, if you weren't accurate, you weren't employed.

It was Fleming's experience as an assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence in the Admiralty in London what gave him the inspiration for many of the escapades of the James Bond character. The name, James Bond, comes from the author of a book on the birds of the West Indies, Fleming's "bible" for the 18 years that he spent there from 1946 to 1964.

Cold war author, Ian Fleming, most famous for his spy novels, also wrote a children's short story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This story was eventually made into a Disney movie. The story was written for his son, Caspar. Fleming suffered a heart attack in Jamaica on the day of his son's 12th birthday, August 12, 1964. The boy never recovered from losing his father at such a tender age and took his own life in 1975.




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