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
