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“... of this writer’s considerable output. Two contemporary English art historians, Hugh Honour and John Fleming, have produced a monumental work of retrieval, systematic certainly, but without the ambition for philosophical synthesis of their German predecessors. They bring to A World History of Art a depth of knowledge and erudition that affords an ...”

“... just like sitting down to tea in the nursery. Something like that seems to have gone on with Ian Fleming. One could hardly say that his fantasy life with James Bond was a case of straightforward compensation. Employers courted him; he charmed the bosses; girls fell over each other to get to bed with him. Or so it seemed, and still seems to his latest ...”

“... tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to Istanbul – the journey in the course of which Bond indulges in these reflections – Bond drinks ‘two ...”

“... Scientific discovery is evidently a dimly understood process. The new biography of Alexander Fleming by Gwyn Macfarlane sheds some unusual light on the fog. One reason for the prevailing lack of understanding is that the canons of writing in professional scientific journals – the ‘scientific literature’ – enforce a style of reporting that is ...”

“... will reveal himself to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the sinister mastermind familiar from three of Ian Fleming’s later novels and from his showdowns with the Bonds played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore. (Copyright issues prevented any showdowns with Bond as played by Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.) Craig’s Bond is tougher than any of his ...”

“... exhibition of the work of a British artist. It is also one of the dullest. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams have resisted the tendency of the last fifteen years or so by which the catalogues of major exhibitions have often been presented as major interpretative studies of the artist and his times. Constable is a catalogue, nothing more. It maximises ...”

“... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of me Defence ...”

“... Robin Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other words, don’t just write for the trade ...”

“... military never drove men to explore the haunted roof of the world. In his Killing Dragons, Fergus Fleming mentions several 16th-century ascents of Pilatus, notoriously wrapped in superstitious legend. In modern times, Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, was ‘first’ climbed in 1786 by Paccard and Balmat to win a prize offered by the scientist Horace ...”

“... as a bit too cuddly and open, and makes you long for the days of secrecy and high adventure before John Major passed the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which not only publicly acknowledged the existence of SIS for the first time, to absolutely no one’s surprise, but also made it subject to Parliamentary oversight. Or it may be that it strikes you as a load ...”

“... notice she wished to avert.’ This comes from Johnston’s charming memoir of the art historians John Fleming and Hugh Honour, published last year.* They too were part of the Lubbock household; their own memory of Origo’s visits was summed up in a sentence: ‘Then this icicle appeared and the whole house pulled itself together.’ Thirty years after ...”

“... determinant. One observatory employee whom Sobel writes about extensively is a certain Mrs Fleming: a Scot who comes over to America pregnant in 1878. Abandoned by her husband, she finds work at the observatory as the director’s maid, and then, when it is discovered that she has a natural mathematical facility, she is hired for astronomical ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be ...”

“... Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the original Labour moderniser,’ the blurb begins. With Labour under Blair ...”

“... incorrectly diagnosed and of the wrong answers half had come from specialists in cardiology. Peter Fleming’s absorbing history does not contain this sobering information, but then it stops at 1970 – and on an upbeat note, with the introduction of cyclosporin, the immunosuppressant drug, and an improved outlook for heart transplant patients. What ...”