'My Name's Bond, James Bond'

'She looked sharply up at him. 'And who might you be?' 'My name's Bond, James Bond'' This book celebrates the greatest of all post-war British fictional icons. For too long the films of the Bond novels have overshadowed their literary source - the bizarre, baroque imagination of Ian Fleming. Full rein is given in this anthology to Fleming's wonderful creations - the magically deranged villains, their appalling sidekicks and their surreal lairs, from Dr No's guano island to Blofeld's Garden of Death. Fleming emerges too from this book as a remarkable writer on nature (albeit nature of a purely malevolent variety) and as an inventor of extraordinarily imagined set pieces - the source of the films' enormous successes.