There can be no more potent figure in post-War
British fiction than Ian Fleming's James Bond. For fifty
years,
for better or worse, he has created a sense of heroism
which has shaped (or warped) the male mind to a degree
that is impossible to imagine British self-identity
without it.
Around the world he is as much part of the strange
currency of Britishness as Princess Diana or Harry
Potter.
Following the success of its Fleming omnibuses, Penguin
Modern Classics are now publishing ten major novels individually,
celebrating Fleming's brilliant imagination and a group
of books which have kept their panache but to modern readers
now also speak volumes about a post-War and increasingly
post-Empire country.
"The most forceful and driving writer of thrillers in England"
- Raymond Chandler |
