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FOR YOUR EYES ONLY: IAN FLEMING + JAMES BOND

Ben MacIntyre (Bloomsbury, £20)

I feel for Ben MacIntyre with this latest attempt to chronicle and analyse the similarities and relationship between Ian Fleming and James Bond. It's not that MacIntyre, with this officially endorsed effort to accompany the current exhibition at the Imperial War Museum to commemorate the centenary of the Oxfordshire author's birth, does a particularly bad job.

In fact this is thoroughly competent. But that's the rub: his subject has been dead for 44 years and over that time too many others have raked through Fleming's life and recounted and embroidered how close he was in reality and in fantasy to 007.

There is just no life left in the subject to discover anything new and exciting.

And, unfortunately for Mr MacIntyre, others have done much better and more insightful work. In fact, he namechecks the best of recent works - the excellent James Bond, the Man and his World, by Henry Chancellor.

Chancellor's 2005 book was packed full of new information - although he did have the private Fleming archive to trawl - yet MacIntyre's feels like a re-heat of all that has gone before it.

One insignificant paragraph proves the point. MacIntyre attributes the number of drinks 007 enjoys in one novel to an unnamed Bondologist. Given this is a supposedly major book on the subject, why didn't he bother to research this himself, rather than lift it from a previous work?

It's not that this is a bad book, and it will entertain those with a shallow knowledge of the subject. But for true fans this is little more than a re-hash of old elements, a Tomorrow Never Dies, if you will, when they deserve a Goldfinger.

11:48am Thursday 1st May 2008

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