IAN FLEMING

THE COMPLETE MAN

Winner of the 2024 CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction

Ian Fleming’s greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote.

lan’s childhood with his gifted brother Peter and his extraordinary mother set the pattern for his ambition to be ‘the Complete Man’, and he would strive for the means to achieve this ‘completeness’ all his life.

Only a thriller writer for his last twelve years, his dramatic personal life and impressive career in Naval Intelligence put him at the heart of critical moments in world history, while also providing rich inspiration for his fiction. Exceptionally well connected, and widely travelled, from the United States and Soviet Russia to his beloved Jamaica, lan had access to the most powerful political figures at a time of profound change.

Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the most gifted biographers working today. His talent for uncovering material that casts new light on his subjects is fully evident in this masterful, definitive biography.

His unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers and his nose for a story make this a fresh and eye-opening picture of a man whose life was overshadowed by his famous creation.

A book of the year in the Sunday Times, Financial Times, Spectator, BBC History Magazine, & one of their books of the year of Allan Massie, William Boyd, Philip Hensher, Sam Leith, Stephen Bayley, Michael Wood, Michael Smith.

Surely the last word on James Bond’s creator. Shakespeare’s intimate grasp of Fleming’s social milieu makes this superb biography even more authoritative.
William Boyd, Spectator

Exemplary… This will stand as the definitive biography
Publishers Weekly

This is a marvellous book about Ian Fleming, but it’s also one of the most engaging portraits of a particular period of British history that I have read in a long time.
Antonia Fraser

Written with Fleming-esque brio and insouciance, with a feeling for the tragic aspects of his life as well as the ironic comedy of it… The amount of new testimony Shakespeare has truffled up about a man nearly 60 years dead is dizzying. The research is impeccable… Shakespeare is an elegant writer… a book so buoyant and delicious that you feel it will be a friend for life.
Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

A must-read.
Evening Standard

A monumental record of Fleming’s life. The completeness of the book is beyond doubt. Shakespeare leaves no future biographer much to discover. Fleming’s place in history is assured.
Max Hastings, Sunday Times

This biography would have pleased Ian Fleming. It is a sustained and engrossing homage to the Olympic icon of a beleaguered Britain, and a writer damned to fame. With scarcely a dull page, it’s a chip off the old block… a superb analysis.
Robert McCrum, The Independent

Nicholas Shakespeare has written a masterpiece in his Ian Fleming: The Complete Man which is a multilayered life of the creator of James Bond, full of the possibilities of master spying and suffused with the warmth of the portrait of a protagonist of great talent and kindness and frailty. His book is better than almost any nonfiction ever gets, a work of literature in its own right.
Peter Craven, The Australian

The best biography of the year was Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming The Complete Man, which reveals the full extent of Fleming’s special operations work.
Sydney Morning Herald

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind on the best book of the year. Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man… the writing is phenomenal. It’s so good that I barely have space for three other great books.
Michael Smith, author of The Real Special Relationship

An absolutely terrific book that somehow places the reader as well as Fleming centre stage, making him/her complicit – involved and present – in the story by the way Shakespeare manages to make the story reverberate, from Fleming to Bond to England to gossip to literary and non-literary interests and back again, all the way through.
Julian Evans, author of The Life of Norman Lewis

A great achievement, all stones turned, yet enigmatic, confident, precise. The tone is exquisitely maintained and reverberative, the control of threads masterly, no sinking into pre-made thoughts. Beautifully done and necessary.
Candia McWilliam

Excellent. Ian Fleming’s life reads like a pacy William Boyd novel, Nicholas Shakespeare has made a grand and thrilling job of its telling
John Quin, The Natuional

Riveting…. read Shakespeare on every part of Ian’s brilliant and let me say tragic life. His research has been prodigious. Time and again he would say of someone I thought I know all about, Oh, but did you know such and such? It would transpire that he’d tracked down the granddaughter of a lover or unpublished diaries or a cutting from some obscure provincial newspaper – or was just using plain insider information… Shakespeare makes you thirst to read more. He must be the ablest disciple in biography of Ian’s pungent instruction: ‘get the reader to turn the page’.
James Fleming, Book Collector

Fascinating, well-researched, neatly written.
D. J. Taylor, Literary Review

An elegant and painstakingly researched biography.
The Observer

Shakespeare tells the story much more thoroughly than has previously been possible. This excellent biography is as worldly and clever as one could wish… The author is also wonderfully adept at describing Ian’s disparate worlds of journalism, literature, espionage and physical danger.
Philip Hensher, Spectator

What a masterful and definitive study this is, enhanced by a novelist’s skill in making it so eminently readable and page-turning. I learned a great deal that I did not know. It is compulsively absorbing.
David Stafford, author of Camp X, Churchill and Secret Service and Roosevelt and Churchill.

Nicholas Shakespeare has the rare ability to reinvigorate subjects that had seemed exhausted. If, like me, you thought you knew all there was to be known about Ian Fleming, prepare for a surprise: the creator of James Bond turns out to be more interesting and less unpleasant than we had thought him to be. Shakespeare’s life of Bruce Chatwin showed him to be a very fine biographer, as well as a much-admired novelist; his life of Ian Fleming is equally compelling. Though a long book, it is written with such brio that the pace never slackens – much like a Bond, one might say.
Adam Sisman, author of John le Carré: the biography

“Shakespeare tells the story much more thoroughly than has previously been possible. This excellent biography is as worldly and clever as one could wish… The author is also wonderfully adept at describing Ian’s disparate worlds of journalism, literature, espionage and physical danger.”

Philip Hensher, The Spectator

“This highly accomplished and readable biography will please many readers.”

Lyndall Gordon, New Statesman

“An elegant and painstakingly researched biography.”

The Observer

“This biography would have pleased Ian Fleming. It is a sustained and engrossing homage to the Olympic icon of a beleaguered Britain, and a writer damned to fame. With scarcely a dull page, it’s a chip off the old block… a superb analysis.”

Robert McCrum, Independent
“Nicholas Shakespeare has the rare ability to reinvigorate subjects that had seemed exhausted. If, like me, you thought you knew all there was to be known about Ian Fleming, prepare for a surprise: the creator of James Bond turns out to be more interesting and less unpleasant than we had thought him to be. Shakespeare’s life of Bruce Chatwin showed him to be a very fine biographer, as well as a much-admired novelist; his life of Ian Fleming is equally compelling. Though a long book, it is written with such brio that the pace never slackens – much like a Bond, one might say.”
Adam Sisman

“What a masterful and definitive study this is, enhanced by a novelist’s skill in making it so eminently readable and page-turning. I learned a great deal that I did not know. It is compulsively absorbing.”

David Stafford, author of Camp X, Churchill and Secret Service and Roosevelt and Churchill.

“This is a marvellous book about Ian Fleming, but it’s also one of the most engaging portraits of a particular period of British history that I have read in a long time.”

Antonia Fraser
“Written with Fleming-esque brio and insouciance, with a feeling for the tragic aspects of his life as well as the ironic comedy of it… The amount of new testimony Shakespeare has truffled up about a man nearly 60 years dead is dizzying. The research is impeccable… Shakespeare is an elegant writer… a book so buoyant and delicious that you feel it will be a friend for life.”
Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

“Nicholas Shakespeare, who wrote the definitive study of Bruce Chatwin, has compiled a monumental record of Fleming’s life. The completeness of the book is beyond doubt. Shakespeare leaves no future biographer much to discover. Fleming’s place in history is assured.”

Max Hastings, Sunday Times

“A must-read.”

Evening Standard

Praise for Nicholas Shakespeare

Nicholas Shakespeare gathers comparisons to the great and the good. He needs none. He is what he is — a very fine English novelist

John Lawton

Nicholas Shakespeare honours the best traditions of the novel

Thomas Keneally, TLS

One of the best English novelists of our time

Wall Street Journal

A great novelist

Peter Craven, The Melbourne Age