Literary Review – October 2023: The new issue features How Bond Was Born; Impressions of Monet; Inequality through the Ages; Adam Smith the Socialist, and more…
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
Becoming James Bond By Nicholas Shakespeare
Anthony Powell, two and a half years older than Ian Fleming, remembered him as ‘one of the few persons I have met to announce that he was going to make a lot of money out of writing novels, and actually contrive to do so’.
The Road to Giverny
Monet: The Restless Vision By Jackie Wullschläger
You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity.
“He brought flesh and blood to the character,” she says. “Bond in the novel is a silhouette. Daniel has given him depth and an inner life. We were looking for a 21st-century hero, and that’s what he delivered. He bleeds; he cries; he’s very contemporary.”
The film’s trailer introduced Auger as: “Young. Beautiful. Trapped. Could be dangerous”.
“He went into the bathroom and had an ice-cold shower and washed his hair with Pinaud Elixir, that prince among shampoos, to get the dust of the roads out of it…”
No Time to Die, as Bond 25 is called, will be out on April 8, 2020 in the U.S. and April 3 in the UK.
Boomers Daily 