Spies, Lies And Deception: Proof That Ian Fleming’s Imagination Wasn't So Fanciful After All

Simon Heffer at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on an upcoming exhibit at the Imperial War Museum

A ghetto blaster from the early 1980s is just one fascinating object in an exhibition called Spies, Lies and Deception opening this Friday at the Imperial War Museum in London, running until next April. This particular blaster is unusual: from the Soviet era, it contained Russian surveillance equipment. In James Bond mode, there is also a fountain pen that fired jets of tear gas, a clutch bag designed by the KGB with a camera in it, a box of matches one of which was a stylus for writing secret messages, and a hollowed-out brush whose cavity could contain film. They were the utensils of the Cold War, proving that Ian Fleming’s imagination was not unduly wild.

The displays include deception in warfare, such as netting covered with camouflage used to conceal trenches from enemy aircraft in the Great War, observation posts disguised as trees and a yeti-like camouflage suit. We learn of the artist Solomon J Solomon, whose such camouflage was. The technique was advanced in the Second World War, and among the exhibits are aerial photographs (for me one of the great surprises of the exhibition) showing how another artist, Christopher Ironside, successfully camouflaged factories to disguise them from German bombers; and the Germans used camouflage in Hamburg to convince the RAF it was bombing factories when it was bombing a lake. Experts from the film studios at Shepperton helped design decoy RAF airfields to mislead the Luftwaffe.

 You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

Spies, Lies and Deception: proof that Ian Fleming’s imagination wasn't so fanciful after all (msn.com)

You can also read my Crime Beat column interview with Ben Macintyre, the author of For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming & James Bond via the below link:

Note: The top photo is of a matchbox containing one match adapted for writing secret messages from WWII. And the above photo is of Ian Fleming. 

An Interview With British Thriller Writer Len Deighton, The Author Of 'The Ipcress File,' 'Funeral In Berlin' And 'SS-GB'

When I was a teenager back in the 1960s I was a huge fan of American crime thrillers and British spy thrillers. I was weaned on Ian Fleming and I later read Graham Greene and John le Carre.

I also read another British spy thriller writer named Len Deighton. Today is his birthday. He is 89.

Unlike the other British spy writers, Deighton’s unnamed spy hero in his first series of thrillers was an overweight, working-class smart aleck. When Michal Caine starred as the spy in the film versions of The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, the producers called him Harry Palmer.

Over the years I’ve read nearly all of Deighton’s novels, including his WWII military novels and his clever alternative history novel, SS-GB, which takes place in a post-WWI Briton that the Nazis have defeated and now occupy.

Last February, when the BBC offered a TV series based on SS-GB, the Telegraph republished Jake Kerridge's interview with Len Deighton from 2009.      

Deighton is famously publicity-shy, and I did wonder whether getting to interview him would be what the acronym-loving secret service bureaucrats of his early spy novels would call a high D of C (Difficulty of Completion) mission. But here he is, relaxed, jolly, indecently sprightly for a man who will celebrate his 80th birthday this week, and quietly pleased that HarperCollins will, from June, be reissuing several of his novels (with new cover designs by his old friend, the Oscar-winning documentary-maker Arnold Schwartzman), culminating in a golden jubilee edition of The Ipcress File in 2012.

 “I was on holiday, I was restless, I started this story, then I put it to one side and got on with my life. And then I met a guy at a party and he said ‘I’m a literary agent.’ He was a literary agent like I was a writer, to tell you the truth.” Jonathan Clowes, his agent to this day, sold what became The Ipcress File to Hodder & Stoughton.

“It might have sunk without a ripple but Harry Saltzman had just made the first Bond film [Dr No, 1962] and it did very well, but that was really because the critics used me as a blunt instrument to beat Ian Fleming over the head.” Saltzman bought the film rights to Ipcress, and Deighton found himself a professional author.

 His first four novels are a wonderful mixture of the exciting and the amusingly humdrum, narrated by an unnamed working-class intelligence officer from Burnley who spends as much time trying to reclaim his expenses as he does searching for kidnapped scientists.

His Eton- and Oxbridge-educated superiors are usually incompetent – “what chance did I stand between the communists on the one side and the establishment on the other” – or treacherous. Much is made of the fact that he is overweight: in Billion Dollar Brain (1966) he is told he has been chosen to go on a mission to Helsinki because he is “the one best protected against cold”. Well, James Bond may be thinner, but so is his dialogue.

Deighton doesn’t see the character as an anti-hero, and stresses that he is a romantic, incorruptible figure in the mould of Philip Marlowe. “This is not the way it is now. Modern fiction is not so keen to guard the integrity of our heroes… When I started writing I had rules. One was that violence must not solve the problem, and I cannot have the hero overcome violence with a counterweight of violence.”

He hopes new readers will “get a laugh” out of his books. Does he think other spy writers are too solemn? “It’s difficult to be sure sometimes what is intended humour and what is unintended, isn’t it?”

… Deighton admits he felt bad that he did not predict how brilliant his friend Michael Caine would be as the hero (newly christened Harry Palmer) in the 1965 film of The Ipcress File; Harry H Corbett was his choice for the role. By this time Deighton was famous. He was seduced by the celebrity lifestyle for a period (becoming the travel editor of Playboy), but soon swore off interviews and parties: “Two things destroy writers: praise and alcohol.”

… “I’m seriously thinking if I can persuade my wife to live in Japan.” Any other ambitions? “I’ve always wanted to land a jet on a carrier. But I’m content. Nobody could have had a happier life than I’ve had.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/len-deighton-interview-nobody-could-have-had-happier-life-had/

You can also read Len Deighton’s piece on his meeting with fellow thriller writer Ian Fleming (Deighton is on the left in the above photo and Fleming is in the center) via the below link:

https://literary007.com/2013/12/13/len-deighton-lunches-with-ian-fleming/ 

Spies, Affairs And James Bond...The Secret Diary Of Ian Fleming's Wartime Mistress

The British newspaper the Telegraph offers excerpts from A Constant Heart: The War Diaries of Maud Russell, 1939-1945. 

Maud Russell (seen in the below photo) was a British socialite who was the mistress of Commander Ian Fleming (seen in the above photo), a Royal Navy intelligence officer and the future author of the James Bond thrillers.  

Long before he created James Bond, a young Ian Fleming had a remarkably close – and secretive – relationship with an older woman, Maud Russell, a fashionable society hostess.

They met in 1931 when Russell was 40 and Fleming just 23. There was a strong mutual attraction, and Fleming quickly became a regular guest at Mottisfont, Russell’s 2,000-acre estate in Hampshire, and at the glamorous parties she threw in her Knightsbridge home, attended by Cecil Beaton, Lady Diana Cooper, Clementine Churchill, Margot Asquith and members of the Bloomsbury Group.

To Fleming, Russell was a sophisticated and impeccably connected mentor who found him first a job in banking, introduced him to members of the Intelligence Corps and, later, paid for his Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, where his 007 novels were written. To Russell, Fleming (named ‘I.’ in her diaries) was the dashing, charismatic young spy who became her close friend, her confidante – and her lover.

These entries from Russell’s private diary take place towards the end of the Second World War, when Fleming worked in naval intelligence and Russell, then 52, was recently widowed; it was a time when, despite the food shortages and air raids, the tide of the war was gradually turning in the Allies’ favour – and, despite his other liaisons, the couple spoke of marriage.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/spies-affairs-james-bond-secret-diary-ian-flemings-wartime-mistress/  

Italian Police Arrest Alleged Mafia Mobsters Who Held Secret Meetings Inside A Giant Fridge

Nick Squires at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on Cosa Nostra members who were arrested after holding meetings in a large fridge.

It was intended as a cunning ruse to evade surveillance by anti-mafia police.

When a bunch of alleged mobsters held their meetings inside a giant fridge in a town in Sicily, they were convinced that the thick insulating walls would protect them being eavesdropped on by police.

But detectives had got wind of the secret summits that were regularly held in the fruit and veg lock-up and had planted recording devices inside, in an operation they code-named “Freezer”.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/21/italian-police-arrest-alleged-mafia-mobsters-held-secret-meetings/ 

Note: If you would like to learn more about the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, you should read John Dickie's Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia.

The Interplay Between Truth And Fiction: The Man With The Poison Gun

Ian Fleming wrote his highly romanticized James Bond thrillers unabashedly for pleasure - his own and the reading public's. The novels contained some fantastic elements, yet Fleming said there was a thin line between fact and his fiction.

"Everything I write has a precedent in truth," Fleming said.  

A case in point is the story of the poison gun used by Fleming in his last Bond novel, The Man With the Golden Gun, and the true story of the KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky, who used a poison gun to murder two men during the Cold War.

Lewis Jones at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a review of Serhii Plokhy's book on Stashinsky, The Man With the Poison Gun.

The title of Serhii Plokhy’s new book echoes that of Ian Fleming’s last and feeblest James Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, published posthumously in 1965. Fleming’s story opens with Bond, presumed dead after his last duel with Blofeld, turning up in London, brainwashed by the KGB to assassinate M with a “curious sort of contraption” that shoots a poisonous liquid.

Plokhy points out that, before Bond tries to kill him, M mentions the recent murders of “Horcher and Stutz” in Munich. Fleming must have had in mind the 1962 trial of Bogdan Stashinsky, a KGB assassin, for the murders in Munich of two of his fellow Ukrainians – Lev Rebet, a journalist, and Stepan Bandera, the leader of the nationalist underground – with just such a device.

The man with the golden gun was Francisco Scaramanga, who grew up in a Catalan travelling circus, as the mahout of Max the elephant. When Max went berserk in Italy, the carabinieri killed him with such upsetting brutality that Scaramanga ran away from the circus to become a paranoiac fetishist and the world’s most feared assassin. The subject of The Man with the Poison Gun is a more prosaic figure – his career began with dodging a train fare – but really a more interesting one. 

Plokhy writes rather badly, and tells us that M’s “true name remains a secret to us”, which does not inspire confidence when Bond himself names him as Admiral Sir Miles Messervy. But as a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, Plokhy knows his stuff, and his account of Bogdan Stashinsky’s life brims with skulduggery.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/real-man-golden-gun1/

You can also read an earlier post on Fleming (seen in the above photo) and the interplay between truth and fiction via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/03/interplay-between-truth-and-fiction-ian.html

Note to Lewis Jones: As for The Man With the Golden Gun being Ian Fleming's "feeblest" thriller, the author died in 1964 before he could polish the novel. Yet it is still a very good thriller, better than most.

Ian Fleming Left Teasers About Bletchley Park In James Bond Novels, Expert Claims

Lydia Wilgress at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece that reports on the speculation that the late thriller writer Ian Fleming left veiled references to top secret Bletchley Park (the UK's NSA-type operation) in his James Bond novels.

Who the real-life spy James Bond is based on is a question fans have been trying to answer for decades - but it seems that Ian Fleming may have borrowed a bit more than just a name for inspiration. 

The author was apparently so enamoured with the secret goings on at Bletchley Park that he left a number of teasers in his 007 novels in a “wild contravention” of the Official Secrets Act, one expert has claimed. 

The hints, which appear to have never been picked up by officials, range from subtle references to the Enigma machine to the inclusion of a game of chess “so obviously” based on real-life competition, which saw a top code breaker pitted against a Soviet grandmaster.  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/02/ian-fleming-left-teasers-about-bletchley-park-in-james-bond-nove/

G20 'Honey Trap' Warning: Fears Prime Minister's Officials Will Be Seduced By Chinese Spies And Have Hotel Rooms Bugged

Tim Ross at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on British government concerns about "honey traps" - attractive women used for espionage against government officials - when the UK officials travel to China for the G20 meetings.

You can read the piece via the below link:

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/03/g20-honey-trap-warning-fears-prime-ministers-officials-will-be-s/ 

Italian Government: Corleone's City Hall Is Mafia-infested

While serving on a U.S. Navy harbor tugboat at the nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland in 1975, I traveled to Sicily on vacation.

Being part-Italian on my mother's side, and as a student of crime since my early teens, I was curious to see the town of Corleone. Corleone, wrongly or rightly, is a town associated mostly with Cosa Nostra, Sicily's infamous organized crime group.

Prior to my trip to Sicily, I'd read a good number of travel and historical books on the island, as well as on Cosa Nostra, and of course I'd read the Mario Puzo novel, The Godfather. I also watched the first two films based on Puzo's novel a few years prior to my trip.

Corleone is the town that writer Mario Puzo used famously for his Godfather novel and he gave the name of the town to his main character. Film director Francis Ford Coppola also used the name of the town in his film series, but he filmed scenes in different towns in Sicily.

Hiring a car and driver in Palermo, I was driven through the beautiful countryside to Corleone and then given a tour of the picturesque Sicilian town with a dark and violent history. The people were warm, friendly and open, although the town held many criminal secrets, then and now.

It was an interesting day that I can still recall vividly.

The British newspaper The Telegraph offers a piece on how Corleone remains plagued by organized crime.        

The Italian government believes Mafiosi have infiltrated the local administration of Corleone, the Sicilian town which inspired the fictional crime clan's name in "The Godfather"novel and movie.

Premier Matteo Renzi's Cabinet on Wednesday dissolved Corleone's municipal government and put its City Hall under temporary control of the interior ministry.

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano had proposed the action. Corleone's mayor also voiced worries about Mafia infiltration.

Using intimidation, Sicily's Cosa Nostra frequently influences decisions and public contract bidding or backs local politicians sympathetic to the Mafia's economic interests.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/10/italian-government-corleones-city-hall-is-mafia-infested/

You can also read an earlier post on the Sicilian Cosa Nostra via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/07/the-real-godfather-true-story-of.html

Bring Me The Head Of John Wayne: Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin Loved American Westerns, But Said John Wayne Was A Threat To Communism And Should Be Assassinated

Simon Sebag Montefiore at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers an interesting piece on Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin, a film buff who wanted to kill John Wayne.

Everybody is a critic.

Every one of Stalin's houses had its own private cinema, and in his last years, the cinema became not only his favourite entertainment but also a source of political inspiration. It was one of the venues from which he ruled the Soviet Empire: this was cinematocracy - rule by cinema.

Stalin loved movies, but he was much more than a movie-buff. The new Communist Party archives in Moscow, and the recently opened personal papers of Stalin, reveal that he fancied himself a super-movie-producer/director/screenwriter as well as supreme censor, suggesting titles, ideas and stories, working on scripts and song lyrics, lecturing directors, coaching actors, ordering re-shoots and cuts and, finally, passing the movies for showing.

So, while in Hitler's Third Reich, even Goebbels, minister of culture and enlightenment, did not perform all these roles, in Soviet Russia, Stalin considered himself (in modern terms) Sam Goldwyn and Harvey Weinstein, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, Joe Eszterhas and Richard Curtis, rolled into one. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3618310/Why-Stalin-loved-Tarzan-and-wanted-John-Wayne-shot.html

Why The Long Held View Of Kipling Is Just So Wrong

Harry Mount at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on a BBC 2 program on author Rudyard Kipling.

George Orwell called Rudyard Kipling a “jingo imperialist”, attacking him for racism, snobbery and his Empire obsession.

So Kipling's not quite the kind of man you’d expect the BBC to defend. But that’s exactly what Kipling’s Indian Adventure, which aired last night on BBC Two, did. This grown-up programme explained how Kipling’s literary career was forged in India, where he was a reporter from the age of 16 to 23.

As a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette, Kipling was a clear-eyed observer, often affectionate towards his Indian subjects, and caustically funny about his British ones.

The programme's presenter, Patrick Hennessey, may seem Establishment (public school, Oxford and a bestseller about his service in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Grenadier Guards) but this was no tub-thumping, red-faced defence of Kipling. Instead, in a diffident, measured way, Hennessey put forward a convincing argument in Kipling’s favour, largely rooted in a close reading of his journalism and books.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/02/19/why-the-long-held-view-of-kipling-is-just-so-wrong/

Umberto Eco's Last Interview

Gaby Wood at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers the last interview with the late Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose and Numero Zero.  

When Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code in 2003, Umberto Eco didn’t think, as others did, that Brown had ripped off his own earlier bestsellers. Eco went one step further: he took credit for inventing Brown altogether.

Fascinated by arcane mysteries and secret societies, Brown shared all the concerns of Eco’s characters. When the two writers finally met, “I told him,” Eco says grumpily, “he should give me royalties!”

At 83, Eco has the physical appearance of a long-term armchair detective. When I arrive at the London hotel bar where we have arranged to meet, he already looks well settled. Eco orders steak tartare and a couple of glasses of Chablis.

... Our conversation takes in, through no plan of mine, subjects ranging from Agatha

Christie to sex with animals, and a comparison of Mussolini with Beyoncé.

Later, I realise that its faintly absurdist quality must have been partly due to the fact that Eco, tired of asking me to repeat my question, had occasionally decided to answer a different one.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/umberto-eco-on-berlusconi-bestiality-and-beyonc/

You can also read Umberto Eco's obituary in the Telegraph via the below link"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12166142/Umberto-Eco-writer-and-scholar-obituary.html

The Prose Factory: What Is Literary Culture, What Is Taste And What Author's Books Will Still Be In Print In 25 Years?

Nicolas Shakespeare reviews DJ Taylor's The Prose Factory for the Telegraph.

Few things are more perishable than literary fame. I was fishing once on an otherwise deserted beach in Tasmania, and a white-bearded man approached, striking up a conversation. He asked my name, and was unable to conceal his excitement when I told him. “No, it’s not possible. You can’t by any chance be related to…” – and out it came – “… the family who make the fishing reels?”

I reflected on his question last month, during a party in London to celebrate my publishers’ 25th anniversary. Gathered together were a hundred or so of our most glittering literary fish. The speech of honour was given by a celebrity chef who had flown in from an “exhausting” American tour. A second speech, by one of England’s foremost novelists, absent with flu, was read out by his editor, who mispronounced Jorge Luis Borges as Borgia (like Cesare). Looking on were familiar literary types. The bestsellers who felt they should be more seriously reviewed. The seriously reviewed authors who felt they should be selling more books. And, outstripping everyone in sales and reviews, Norway’s answer to Proust, Karl Ove Knausgaard, who fainted and had to be taken outside. How many of these names, I wondered, would still be in print in 25 years? Not even the cookery writer, suggests D J Taylor’s entertaining if sobering history.

The Prose Factory is a survey of English literary life since the First World War. At its heart, claims Taylor, are two inquiries: what is literary culture, and what is taste? The looseness of his theme allows him to stray where he wants, at one point meandering into the field of popular lyrics, and discerning the improbable influence of Nancy Mitford’s The Sun King behind the Beatles’ song Here Comes the Sun.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/which-of-todays-novelists-will-stand-the-test-of-time/

Dean Martin: The Man Whose Voice Captured Christmas

I'm a huge fan of entertainer Dean Martin, whom I always think of as Dino, and during the Christmas season I listen to many of his classic Christmas songs.

So I was interested in reading Martin Chilton's good piece on Dean Martin and Christmas at the British newspaper the Telegraph.

When Elvis Presley was introduced to Dean Martin's young daughter Deana, the singer leaned in and whispered: "They call me the King of Rock and Roll, but your dad is the King of Cool."

The King of Cool, who died on Christmas Day 20 years ago, had a spectacularly successful recording career. Martin had 40 Top 10 singles between 1950 and 1969 and three of them – That's Amore (1953), Memories are Made of This (1955) and Everybody Loves Somebody (1964) – were million-sellers.

There were a lot of trials and tribulations before the man born Dino Paul Crocetti on June 17, 1917, in Steubenville, Ohio, made it to the top. Martin, the son of an Italian immigrant barber, was a reluctant performer as a teenager, believing that he would make more money as a prize-fighter and cardsharp. But after a spell labouring in a steel mill, and at the urging of enthusiastic friends, he began singing at weekends in small clubs.

At 21, he was spotted performing in a bar by a jazz bandleader named Sammy Watkins, who was impressed by his lush delivery of songs. At that time, the youngster was calling himself Dino Martini (after the popular Italian opera star Nino Martini) but Watkins renamed him Dean Martin and a show business legend was born.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/dean-martin-the-man-whose-voice-captured-christmas/

You can also read an earlier post on ole Dino via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/11/feeling-italian-here-is-smooth-sound-of.html

If you wish to learn more about Dean Martin you should read Nick Tosches' interesting biography of the great entertainer.

RIP To The Godfather Of Tartan Noir: Scottish Writer William McIlvanney Dies Age 79

The Guardian reports that William McIlvanney, the author of Laidlaw, has died.

The celebrated Scottish writer William McIlvanney has died aged 79 after a short illness.

The author of the Laidlaw trilogy and numerous other Glasgow-based works such as Docherty, The Big Man and The Kiln died peacefully at his home in the city on Saturday.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/05/scottish-writer-william-mcilvanney-dies-aged-79

You can also Allan Massie's piece in the Telegraph on McIlvanney via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10080000/Scotlands-master-of-crime-is-also-its-Camus.html

On The Trail Of Mark Twain

Chris Leadbeater at the Telegraph visits places associated with Mark Twain on his birthday.

Few figures in the annals of literature can have generated more words than Mark Twain. If it was not the many works that this fabled giant of letters created during his 74-year lifetime, it was the reams of praise that have come afterwards.

Whether or not the man born – and known to his family – as Samuel Langhorne Clemens ranks as the greatest of all American novelists is perhaps an issue that can only be settled by a debate in some celestial bar with the spirits of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck also in attendance (all of whom might decide that the answer to the question is still on terra firma in the shape of Harper Lee). But there can be no doubt that, over a century on from his death, Twain’s reputation in the literary firmament is still lofty indeed, his most important books – notably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) – still in position as cornerstones of art in the English language.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/northamerica/usa/12025693/On-the-trail-of-Mark-Twain.html

A Look Back At W.C. Fields On The 75th Anniversary Of His Great Film, 'The Bank Dick'

Martin Chilton at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a look back at W.C. Fields and The Bank Dick.

W. C. Fields, a most defiantly disreputable comedian, has fallen out of the public consciousness, but the 75th anniversary of his masterpiece film The Bank Dick seems like a good time to salute one of the 20th-century's most original comic talents. Fields was doing Python-esq things long before Python, admits John Cleese. 

William Claude Dukenfield has not been entirely forgotten since his grim alcoholic's death on Christmas Day in 1946, aged 66, of course. He is one of the faces on the cover of iconic album Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and he even pops up in an episode of The Sopranos: Tony does an imitation of Fields after watching The Bank Dick. Cleese believes that Fields "had the courage and brilliance to make riskier and more profound jokes than Chaplin and Keaton”, and that's certainly true of the subversive humour of The Bank Dick.

At a time when Hollywood was offering a cloying version of family life (such as MGM's Andy Hardy movies), Fields showed the family as a festering hotbed of resentments. In the Bank Dick, written by Fields under the glorious nom de plume Mahatma Kane Jeeves, his character Egbert Sousè is at war with his wife, daughter and mother-in-law. With Fields, there is usually a subtle malice in play about family life, masked by mock affection: "Did you warble my little wren?" he says to his grim-faced wife Agatha. His status-minded wife insists that Sousè "is pronounced Sou-sè. Accent grave over the ‘e’”. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comedy/comedians/wc-fields-a-master-of-comedy/ 

John le Carré: As Slippery As His Characters?

The British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on John le Carre and the new biography of the spy novelist.

John le Carré is one of the great English mysteries, like Stonehenge or the Princes in the Tower. "I'm a liar," he says. "Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist."

One of the reasons that Adam Sisman's new biography has been so eagerly awaited is that it promised, with its subject's help, to unpick the contradictions and obfuscations in le Carré's own accounts of his life.

Le Carré may be ready to tell the truth. He turned 84 on Monday, and like many people in old age seems to have been visited by a new compulsion to set the record straight. When I interviewed him a couple of years ago and thanked him at the end for answering my questions so fully, he replied: "Yes, I didn't mean to."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/john-le-carre-biographer-interview/ 

The Spy Files: How Kim Philby And Anthony Blunt Turned On Their Fellow 'Cambridge' Agents

Tom Whitehead and Tom Morgan at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on the notorious Cambridge spy ring.

Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt turned on their fellow “Cambridge” agents in a desperate attempt to deflect suspicion from themselves as the Soviet spy ring first began to be exposed, files reveal for the first time.

Philby came under immediate suspicion when his associates Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean suddenly fled to Russia in May 1951 as the net closed in on the latter as a Soviet mole.

Burgess had been sent by Philby to tip Maclean off but was not supposed to go with him to Russia and when he did it turned the spotlight on Philby, a senior MI6 agent.

But within days of their disappearance, and with doubts still lingering over Burgess, Philby wrote to the head of MI6 suggesting he had all “the essential requirements of an espionage agent”.

Similarly, Blunt went to see the deputy director general of MI5 on a fishing exercise to see what they knew of Maclean and also pointed the finger at Burgess.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11949108/kim-philby-anthony-blunt-cambridge-spies.html 

Note: To learn more about Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring I suggest you read Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. 

Act, Kill, Win: Anthony Horowitz, The Author Of The James Bond Continuation Novel, 'Trigger Mortis,' Wants The Old Blunt Instrument Back: Says Recent Bond Movies Portray 007 As Weak

John Binham at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on Anthony Horowitz, the author of the new James Bond continuation novel, on how the recent Bond films have portrayed 007 as weak.

For more than 50 years, James Bond films have been feted as the ultimate action movies, with ever more spectacular special effects, sinister villains and an endless stream of glamourous love interests.

But, according to the author officially anointed as successor to 007’s creator Ian Fleming, modern James Bond films have lost their way because they make the fictional secret agent appear too soft.

Anthony Horowitz, who was chosen by the Fleming estate to write the latest James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, said Skyfall – the first Bond film to smash through the $1 billion mark in global box office takings – just makes him “angry” because of the way it portrays 0007 as “weak”. 

And he voiced dismay at signs that the upcoming film Spectre will delve into Bond’s “doubts” and “insecurities” instead of concentrating on defeating villains.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11833706/Modern-James-Bond-films-too-soft-says-Flemings-successor.html

The Gestapo: The Myth And Reality Of Hitler's Secret Police

Miranda Seymour reviewed Frank McDonough's The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler's Secret Police in the British newspaper the Telegraph. 

The Gestapo (Geheime Staats Polizei, or Secret State Police) was the Nazis’ most efficient instrument of terror. Its spies were omnipresent, its victims subject to torture and mass deportation to the death camps. It seems incredible that humane qualities could be exhumed from such evil, but that is one achievement of Frank McDonough’s nuanced study. 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:  
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/the-gestapo-the-myth-and-reality-of-hitlers-secret-police-by-frank-mcdonough-review/