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Hello and welcome to The Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for the Spectator.

And this week, my guest is the novelist, critic and

biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, whose new book is Ian Fleming, The Complete Man. Nicholas, welcome.

Now, in the course of this book, which is about the man who obviously is primarily, if at all,

known for having invented James Bond, you discover that the real band was far more complex

than his creation and indeed perhaps deserves to be remembered for other things. Can you tell me how

you came to this and how you started writing a book on what might as see'd like quite a mind-out

subject? Well, as you said, I'm a novelist before I'm a biographer and I'd gone to

Tasmania where I have a remote beach act to begin work on another novel when I get a call

from my agent in London saying, we've got rather an interesting proposition for you. The Fleming

family are rather keen to commission a new biography, an authorised biography, the first since

1996, when John Pearson had worked with Ian Fleming, wrote his very, very good first

biography. Would you be interested? My first reaction, I have to say, was slight weariness,

because I tilled in the vineyard of Peter Fleming before for a non-fiction

book on Churchill coming to pass six minutes in May and I'd been very impressed by Peter Fleming

but the image I got of his younger brother Ian out of sideways glances was very very different I had an

image of a kind of wife beating cad who spent his time playing golf and

...