His book was published just before the films with Daniel Craig as Bond hit the scene. I had never considered that the creation of Bond might be a response to a declining empire in need of a hero. Winder's humor was biting and engaging. I also learned more about English history during and after the world wars. Apr 01, Mark rated it liked it. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux Published In: A shattered great power ensconced in the post-World War II ruin. A proud world power brought low. In this world, Ian Fleming created an alternate world of secret British greatness and glamor.
Fleming via Bond has his say on much of the world in that era; sex, the monarchy, food, class, America, etc. This novel explores the Bondian influence on postwar Britain. Great Britain The Feel: Almost like, the author found more and considered more than he was initially prepared to do when he started the process. Bond stands in contrast. He is from the Britain that they, both the author and the people of Britain who were his first fans, seem to wish existed rather than the one that actually existed during that time.
Where the author is describing the experience of snorkelling after reading the scuba scenes in Bond books… If someone goes into a tropical sea in a Bond novel the narrative demands the immediate presence of some dangerous fish. Indeed, it would be a banal disgrace if there were not one - just as Bond cannot talk to a girl without having sex with her or enter a casino without winning big. Most unfortunately this has so raised the bar for anyone entering the water as to make the actual experience a bit woeful. Standing at a baccarat table in a casino on an American Indian Reservation, while awesome, is not Monte Carlo or wherever Bond happens to be playing.
We were spoiled by the fiction, I think. This book is very well paced. The author bends words in a wonderful way. I have misgivings about the way the book points at and elaborates on its central premise, but it is extremely well written. When he describes setting up toy soldiers and fighting mock battles, he could have been with my brother and I in Lake Dallas, Texas and our armies gathered along both sides of a small drainage in the backyard as we start throwing small rocks, sorry Warporn may be a generational thing or it may be hardwired into us as a species, but it is assuredly not just a British 50s, 60s, 70s childhood phenomena.
They are very much a part of their time. Reading about the books when the author summarizes them and comments on them feels a lot like watching sausage be made. This may be what saves Bond from the trashbin of history where characters like Matt Helm have fallen. Is it just me or is this a damned odd paragraph? As a memoir, this book is fragmentary and scraped together from very slightly interesting bits and bobs.
My life has just not been melodramatic enough to take up more than a few pages. I had a cheerful childhood packed with affection, no specific features to incite sympathy and no adventures to speak of. As history it will anger many, filled as it is with shocking generalizations and lack of documentation. I share that anger. This book was written in large part because I want to convey, perhaps in an overdrawn form, some of the ways in which Britain has changed-and by following James Bond show some of a vanished world which he in various ways pulled together.
I get the point of it. But, the paragraph strikes me as odd. Sort of a introduction denouement. We look at the last and see vibrant colors and artists bringing the heroic into focus vs the last appearing as staticy, flitty, sound and black and white images that make them seem small and comic opera. This perception is fed by the media of the images and sounds as much as the history that is known about the characters. The idea of postwar Britain as a stuffed cobra and a front room full of bric-a-brac, tourist trap tchotchke crap from the vanishing empire is well presented One of his commentaries on Conservatives in the postwar British period could have been his speaking on America in the modern day.
Britain was left with a zany system in which the MPs of the Conservative Party, who ruled cumulatively for thirty-five years from , would not themselves have dreamed of using either the public health system or public transport beyond first class carriages on trains and would have been socially ostracized if they had sent their children to state schools. This left a long lasting, very peculiar split where the Conservatives, often blue blooded figures of astonishing dimness or over-articulate fatalism, continued to attract support from a broad base - partly aspirational but also, and more important, bitter and angry about the whirlwind ruining their world.
A screenplay on a book about the history and culture of Britain told through the filter of James Bond Though I warn you now, they are becoming more and more dated as the years slide passed. Connery will always be my Bond. I really liked Craig and Brosnan. Moore and Dalton were okay. Was never a Lazenby or Niven guy. I believe wholeheartedly that Idris Elba should be James Bond. And that James Bond should be the cover identity given to the top spy in Britain.
Always only one, but always evolving with the times and becoming something new. At the end, this piece of nonfiction is the author coming to terms with what his country is and where its at. It is hard to have the lies we tell ourselves brought out into the light and exposed. This is going to color my experience with those novels and the movies. Sometimes, the braces have to fall away. Though in truthfulness, the way Fleming is described here, I doubt that I would have liked him either. Though the story purports to be about Bond, the world he created and that he was created by and that he is mentioned on every other page, this is tangentially at best about Bond and is more along the lines of a diatribe against what Britain was and what she became in the s.
The book is anti-royalist, anti-Conservative, anti-Labour, and is essentially anti-British. I love the way this is written. But there is a bit of feeling like I am being made to look at myself naked in the mirror or to stare at my own feet. Confronting your foibles through the writing of someone else and having a hero be undressed in this fashion is jarring. Case by case basis, I would absolutely give anything else written by this author a look.
Could have benefited from the editor drawing the narrative back onto the path a time or three, especially in the introductory chapter. Ian Fleming once had an ongoing affair with the mother of Chris Blackwell. Chris Blackwell and Island Records helped bring Jamaican music out to the world. A ton of artists in many genres found their way through Island Records over the years. Sep 20, Annabel Frazer rated it it was ok Shelves: This book is an oddity and contributed to a second Did Not Finish for me in a fortnight.
You'd assume from the title that it's a cheerful exploration of the Bond books but in fact it's angry, very angry. Britain has had a disgraceful past and has a disastrous, deluded present and the Bond books are a compelling reflection and exploration of this truth. All of which you could argue is true and I was happy to engage with the book's arguments, despite the fact that I kind of vaguely like James Bond This book is an oddity and contributed to a second Did Not Finish for me in a fortnight.
All of which you could argue is true and I was happy to engage with the book's arguments, despite the fact that I kind of vaguely like James Bond. And Britain for that matter. However, the problem is that while the arguments are cogent and made well, they are simply made over and over again, over numerous chapters with no particular structure, which makes a tiring read. The author is clearly riding a hobby-horse - while I don't think the book is self-published, it rather gives that impression, with its long-winded style crying out for an editor.
That's not to say he isn't a good writer - he's got a very effective way with adjectives, for instance, using them to make powerful, often savage statements about his subject. But the trouble is the lack of editing - we get two adjectives to a noun, four sub-clauses to a sentence, seven sentences to a paragraph, and as I mentioned above, whole chapters repeating essentially the same argument. You also get very little on Bond.
The book is, despite its title, mostly about Britain after the Second World War - and like I said, it's very angry, mostly about British political decisions in the Fifties. This leads to my second problem with the writing style - constant sweeping assertions along the lines of 'it is impossible for us now, looking back, not to feel And what are we to make of a line which runs roughly: Is such a sweeping generalisation of all people and places even worth making? I don't feel qualified to comment on the historical views in the book - and another of my worries is the sneaking sense that the author wasn't either.
Pan Macmillan's trade news has a new home
He generously admits to being no historical expert and having done no research, which is all very well, but his pronouncements on history are so savage and so insistent that they feel irresponsible for a self-styled amateur. On Bond, he is far more entitled to his own opinion and perhaps it doesn't really matter that his views are so far away from mine. Moonraker the worst of the books? The statement on Bond that surprised me most though was the statement that Fleming 'certainly' wrote the books to impress Ann Rothermere, his wilful and desirable mistress and future wife.
I've read a lot about both Fleming and his wife and I've never come across this idea before. It's not supported by any footnotes or evidence of any sort. I eventually gave up when I reached a section on Casino Royale. The rights to the film had been sold again, the author reported, and perhaps there was finally hope that a reasonably accurate film version of this book could be made, which would be moody, despairing and dark. This very prescient remark the book was written in reminded me that the author had never seen the Daniel Craig films - and this does seem to question the usefulness of his ideas to us now.
He also says that an American 'Bond' would be impossible because American thrillers are always set in the US. It's perhaps unfair to throw his failure to predict Jason Bourne at him, but this is an indication of the type of sweeping assertion he is prone to. I was no fan of Craig when he was hired and I have mixed feelings about the films he's made Quantum tending, perversely, to be my favourite , but there's no denying that his films have changed public perception of Bond, yet again.
For this reason, which is no fault of the author, his book is now somewhat out of date and I chose to make that my reason for not finishing it. Aug 20, Joseph Hamilton rated it did not like it. I was lulled into buying this book by the seductive cover. Don't get fooled like me.
- Love Is in the Air: Love, Quotes and Words of Wisdom!
- See a Problem??
- .
- First Families.
Quirky - but became a little repetitive. Nov 11, Michael Pryor rated it liked it. Jun 01, Elan Durham rated it it was amazing. I really took my time beginning 'The Man Who Saved Britain', but once I got started, there was something so charming and witty about author Simon Winder's premise and style of narration that I collected several quotes to demonstrate why if you are a fan of you should run - not walk - to the nearest book store or Amazon. The author is so eccentrically fascinated by James Bond as a cultural artifact of Great Britain that reading his foray into the hows and whys of Bond as a British institution and personal totem for the author is not unlike embarking on a new theme park ride: Extraordinarily funny, engaging, and still captivating, though published in - just when James Bond was ready to burst back onto the screen with Daniel Craig - I'm almost sorry Winder didn't wait to see the new 'Casino Royale' to report his impressions, in a kind of postscript to his meditations on the earlier ouevres from the 60's's.
Surely he must agree it is a great addition to the Bond catalogue? Here's a taste of Simon Wilder's prose. If you like it, you'll enjoy reading his World of James Bond: This is one of those faith-based issues' I tried it once in Las Vegas and nobody laughed: He had a sort of patrician unflappability which reduced the entire population to the status of panicked yet loyal estate workers, reassured by the Master's self control even if it was clear to everyone that the animals had some foam-flecked, rolling-eyed illness and that the manor house was burning down' Even as we are picking our noses or clipping our toenails there is a piece of us saying, 'Mr.
Bond, all of my life I have been in love with gold. I love its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness' This last sentiment must have been written from the perspective of a pre-adolscent, surely I'll leave some of his more classic Pink Pantherish bits for future readers.
The Man Who Saved Britain by Simon Winder
A great performance of a book, though Winder's historical perspective vis-a-via Great Britain the rest of the world may not agree with everyone. Aug 13, Tony rated it really liked it Shelves: It is impossible to categorize this book into any standard genre. The author is a popular historian in England, and has put together several well-received anthologies on a variety of topics. Winder admits that his first encounter with Bond as a young boy were similar, but found that his interpretation changed radically over the years as he aged. There is a strong temptation to quote from this work, but I find that many of the potential quotes disagree with each other.
I do think that this book is worth reading, if only to encounter an alternative history of the world up to the beginnings of the s. I guarantee that you will not be bored, though you will certainly will be challenged in your beliefs. Mar 30, A. Bowdoin Van Riper rated it liked it Shelves: The Man Who Saved Britain is a hot mess of a book: Any scholar or serious fan of the James Bond novels and films will probably be seized, at least once while reading it, with an urge to throw it across the room. Even so, every scholar and serious fan should read it.
They offered British readers — trapped in a nightmare of rationing, rubble-strewn cities, and reduced expectations — a fantasy life filled with fine food, expensive liquor, commitment-free sex, and exotic surroundings. The good stuff is presented, however, in a zigzag style that is — to be charitable — a challenge to follow. Winder never seems to stay with a single thought for very long before he caroms off in a seemingly random direction to explore another, equally interesting one. That he often returns to the original thought, pages or entire chapters later, is some comfort, but not much.
The good stuff is also wrapped in thick layers of authorial showboating: Its worth wading through all this to get to the good stuff, but I found myself looking at the opposite wall of the room. Claro que a final de cuentas el resultado es el esperado: En resumidas cuentas, recomiendo este apasionante estudio si gustan del personaje James Bond, de lo contrario les garantizo aburrimiento absoluto. Jan 07, Mary rated it it was amazing Shelves: A thoroughly enjoyable book that is at once a memoir, a cultural history of Britain from the Second World War through the s, and a meditation on the troubling nature of being a James Bond fan in modern times.
Written and released prior to the Bond reboot represented by the Daniel Craig films, The Man Who Saved Britain describes James Bond as simultaneously a pernicious fantasy of the racist, imperialist right-wing and a figure of comfort who helped postwar Britain manage its inevitable decli A thoroughly enjoyable book that is at once a memoir, a cultural history of Britain from the Second World War through the s, and a meditation on the troubling nature of being a James Bond fan in modern times.
Written and released prior to the Bond reboot represented by the Daniel Craig films, The Man Who Saved Britain describes James Bond as simultaneously a pernicious fantasy of the racist, imperialist right-wing and a figure of comfort who helped postwar Britain manage its inevitable decline as the Empire crumbled from beneath it.
The Man Who Saved Britain is particularly beguiling because of the author's humorous voice and his willingness to examine the "disturbing world" of thoughtless racism, sexual sadism, and excessive consumerism that James Bond lives in throughout the novels and especially in the films. Winder ties together some of Bond's influences the adventure novels of H.
Johns ; the bleakness and despair of postwar Britain; and perhaps the odd tastes of Ian Fleming himself. Bond is at once a suave ladies' man and a merciless killer; a loyal civil servant and a member of the cultural elite; an aspirational fantasy and a man who can truly belong nowhere on Earth. My only regret is that this book isn't longer; I would love to know what Winder thinks of the modern Bond films and their diminished villains, their Bond who gets really hurt and requires lengthy recuperation time, as well as psychological tests administered by a female M.
Aug 07, Palmyrah rated it did not like it. Yet nothing could be madder or more cynical than Mr. This is history and social commentary written by a movie nerd who should, frankly, have stuck to film reviews. By the way, he doesn't think much of the Bond books or films either, except for From Russia with Love and the movie version of Goldfinger.
May 25, Jennifer rated it really liked it. This one was due back to the library but I couldn't let two of his books go unfinished. I like his writing style but it can lack focus and be maddening.
- Emergency Assistance for Agricultural Land Rehabilitation.
- The Wishing King.
- Ready for your next read?!
- Feed the Startup Beast: A 7-Step Guide to Big, Hairy, Outrageous Sales Growth.
- THE DEAD HOUSE.
His jocular, conversational style often lacks helpful transitions and you can get lost. Fortunately this topic is wide enough to accomodate and he explains from the outset that this is part memoir, part history of Britain, and of course biography of Bond and Fleming. Oddly enough, reading this book helps me make sense of the awkward, grim period This one was due back to the library but I couldn't let two of his books go unfinished. Oddly enough, reading this book helps me make sense of the awkward, grim period of British history from post-war to Thatcher. This book isn't objective enough to be proper history but it is helpful to see this period through the eyes of someone growing up.
The spy who saved us
And it helps me understand the crazy quilt of English newspapers, particularly the Daily Mail. His humor made me laugh on public transit; definitely worth the library fine. Also an interesting sidebar on Jamaica since Fleming wrote the books there and he is responsible for some of the mythology that makes it a popular tourist destination today although the effects would horrify him.
I may have to revisit the Bond oeuvre in response. Jan 17, Ivy rated it it was ok Recommended to Ivy by: Oh brother, two books I only read half of in one week! I hope I'm not making a habit of this. I think seeing Timothy Dalton grapple with the role in the Miami Vice-tinged "Licence to Kill" was what killed my brief fling with the super spy. Also, this book examines the effects and context of James Bond through a very British scope in a very conversational t Oh brother, two books I only read half of in one week!
Also, this book examines the effects and context of James Bond through a very British scope in a very conversational tone.
The golden shot
The reader is expected to have a certain familiarity with the local doings of Britain, and the author skips lightly over bits of history that are, to native-borns, probably common knowledge. Anyone who has read Dominic Sandbrook's brilliant history of the Fifties and Sixties, Never Had It So Good, will already be familiar with the coronation chicken-filled shabby landscape that Winder paints altogether more luridly.
His is an unforgiving portrait of a country run by exhausted, corrupt Tories and lorded over by an aristocracy apparently blithely unaware that the foundations of their privilege had been swept away by the war. But Winder's tone becomes affectionate when he turns to Fleming himself, that embodiment of the cigarette holder-sporting elite. He looks at Goldeneye, the author's hideaway in Jamaica Noel Coward was a neighbour , notes his heroic drinking, his tip-tapping at his gold-plated typewriter, and concludes that for all the comical bilge that he produced and that includes the sex scenes, names such as Pussy and Kissy and the consumerism dressed up as jetset sophistication there were moments of poetry in his fiction.
Not just the guilty pleasure of hearing villains deliver insanely baroque speeches, but the rich underwater scenes, the hypnotic level of detail in the exotic locations and, in From Russia With Love, the magnificently oppressive sense of an evil bureaucracy closing in on Bond. But this book is not literary criticism; it is much more personal. Winder puts Fleming's work into the context of his own childhood, evoking the era of early-Seventies boyhood entertainment - a vista of incredibly bloodthirsty war comics, self-assembly Spitfire model kits, Action Man commando figures and, indeed, a nation unable to forget its war triumph 30 years previously.
In one yelpingly funny passage, he recounts how, as a lad, he and his friend re-enacted a key sequence of The Man With the Golden Gun in his parents' living room using as props a black swivel chair and light switches flicked on and off rapidly. This was after an even more inventive use of the room's green carpet for a restaging of The Dam Busters.
Slightly more disturbing is the boarding-school memory of the younger boys being made to act out the title sequence of again The Man With The Golden Gun in the dorm by dancing nude on beds with torches flashing around, a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh looking on. Either way, the argument is that to a generation of boys brought up on 'achtung Tommy' war fiction, Bond represented a British future that could never be.
Neither pop-culture analysis nor biography nor social history, this book is a bizarre mix and yet a weirdly compelling one; especially towards the end when, finally moving on to the subject of the films, Winder throws out all decorum to do a spectacular and enjoyable critical demolition job. There is just one error of judgment and it's a mistake most Bond aficionados make: Winder has little time for Roger Moore, who was in fact the best screen Bond of all.