Andrew Lycett
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Despite flunking out of Cheltenham Ladies’ College after one term, Ann Fleming, the wife of James Bond’s creator, was highly intelligent and not a little opinionated. She objected to Kingsley Amis writing the first posthumous James Bond novel because she felt he was a left-wing opportunist with little sympathy for 007’s patriotic core values.
And, despite enjoying the financial returns, she also had no desire to see anyone carrying on her husband’s work. For she realised that ‘continuation novels’, as such books are now generically known, are seldom much good, having the unintended (though, from her point of view, arguably beneficial) result
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Sarah Dunant on the life of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
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'McDormand has come closer to Lady Macbeth in some of her previous grimly comic performances ... Here she can convey only the banality of evil, as when she fussily curtails the banquet after Macbeth’s hallucination.'
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