Ian Fleming on Crime and Spy Fiction (and non-fiction!)

[Single-O-Seven]

Another great post Revelator - thank you!

Last summer I got my hands on a copy of The Silent World. I kept it on hand whenever I hiked down to the beach, and between swimming and snorkelling, I would lie in the sand under the sun and read a few passages. It’s still immensely readable. While the equipment and techniques (and popularity) of scuba have advanced greatly since the book was published, Cousteau’s words still capture the thrill of underwater exploration like nothing else can. Even some of the best modern photographs and footage of the undersea world often pale in comparison to the poetry and passion that are present in Cousteau’s vivid words. The fact that it appealed to and inspired Fleming so much is easy to understand.

[Revelator]

You’re very welcome! I’m happy to report that a review of another Cousteau book is in the pipeline, probably for next week. Fleming also reported on a couple of Cousteau’s expeditions for The Sunday Times and admired him greatly.

[Single-O-Seven]

Great to know. I can understand the kinship between Fleming and Cousteau. Both had a child-like sense of wonder and adventure, which both brought to life in their works - and passed on to the rest of us.

[Bryce_003]

Great stuff indeed. Yes, I do imagine both were much the same in some respects. Old Ian did love to snorkel in Jamaica and dive.

[Revelator]

Full Fathom Five (Sunday Times, April 17, 1960)

Captain Cousteau’s Underwater Treasury. By Jacques-Yves Cousteau & James Dugan. (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.)

By Ian Fleming

Swimming is really an extremely dull activity unless you are showing off to the spectators or competing at it. Swimming in the sea is just as dull as going for a walk in the middle of a snowfield or a desert. There is nothing to look at or occupy your mind, and you go on, automatically moving your limbs, until you are tired and it is time to go back.

Around 1942 Jacques Cousteau and his happy band of comrades altered all this. It was he who taught the common man to look under the sea as he swam, and, suddenly, swimming became interesting. Interest and curiosity, the act of focusing one’s eyes, and mind, have results you do not expect. I suppose I can swim for pleasure about half a mile before I get bored and therefore tired, but, with a mask on, and if the underwater territory is a new one, it is almost impossible for me to stop swimming. A mile or two is nothing, and I have a feeling that if I were to visit the Great Barrier Reef, I wouldn’t stop until a mud fish or a giant clam got me.

Cousteau, unhonoured and scantily sung, has put man back under the sea where he came from, and, from what the scientists say, he has done this by chance just at the moment in history when anyway we are being driven back into the oceans in search of more food and raw materials.

I am sure he never meant to cause this world-wide revolution, though, being the extraordinary man he is, he would certainly have been a pioneer in something. What first inspired him might, be expressed in the words of Thomas Fuller: “He goes a great voyage that goes to the bottom of the sea.”

Unfortunately, Cousteau writes far too little about his experiences. I doubt if The Silent World would ever have got written but for James Dugan, who somehow squeezed the book out of him. Cousteau just has not got patience for writing, and he is totally uninterested in the paraphernalia of fame. Fortunately, James Dugan keeps on at him, and one day we shall get his second volume of biography, the fantastic tale of his last ten years in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles, prospecting for oil for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (most successfully, I understand), plumbing the great ocean deeps, and other thrilling exploits of which we read only scraps in the newspapers.

But now James Dugan, who I am sure again did most of the work, has made him put together in this thick and beautifully illustrated volume more than sixty of his favourite underwater adventure stories from all literature. Everything is here—sharks, octopuses, treasure, submarine battles, exploration, archaeology, the glorious beauty of the coral reefs. Everyone who has ever put on an underwater mask will enjoy this fat, rich anthology, and if any teacher is looking for a wonderful source for reading aloud to boys—and girls, for that matter—of from ten to over twenty, then this, and especially now, on the threshold of the Ocean Age, is the book for him.

[Revelator]

Partner! You Have Triumphed My Ace… (Daily Graphic, Sept. 28, 1949)

By I.L.F. [Ian Lancaster Fleming]

Did you know that “trump” was originally “triumph”? Did you know that spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs were originally swords, cups, coins and staves, representing the nobility, the clergy, tradesmen, and peasants—the main social classes of the Middle Ages?

Have you reflected that not even the French Revolution or the Communists succeeded in replacing the kings and queens in the pack with other symbols, and were you aware that Wild Bill Hickock shot all the pips out of a ten of spades at twelve paces?

Not me, and I still don’t know the rules of “Canasta,” the new card game which is sweeping America on the heels of gin rummy, after reading The Complete Card Player, by Albert Ostrow (The Bodley Head, 15s.). Nor do I know the latest contract bridge rules and I don’t know the odds for drawing a card at “chemin de fer.” These are serious lapses in an American card encyclopaedia “which should challenge Hoyle as the general reference book.”

But if you want to play Bimbo high-low at poker, Blind Hookey, Cedarhurst Gin, Clobberyash, Double-dummy with a widow, Idiot’s Delight, Oh Pshaw, Seven-toed Pete or Stealing the Old Man’s Bundle—this is the book for you.

[Dustin]

What a curious assortment of odd games this book seems to have been…

[Revelator]

I tried googling those games, and in some cases the only information I found was from the book under review! Turns out The Complete Card Player is available at the Internet Archive.

[Dustin]

Great find!

[Revelator]

The White Cheat (Sunday Times, November 2, 1947)

Gamesmanship. By Stephen Potter. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 6s.)

By Ian Fleming

On the analogy of white lies, this little book is an aid to the white cheat, hereafter referred to as a “gamesman.” We have all met gamesmen and perhaps been defeated by their gamesmanship. It has fallen to Mr. Potter to be their first champion, the first chronicler of their “ploys” and, who knows, perhaps the subversive guide towards a new golden age in British sport when Ryder Cups, Ashes and the goblets of Wimbledon, Henley and the Olympics will all come home again.

After some introductory remarks on the history and origin of gamesmanship, the author proceeds to the “flurry” ploy, of which the basic axiom is “the first muscle stiffened (in the opponent) is the first point gained.”

His description of preparations for leaving home in the opponent’s car en route for the tennis courts is a workmanlike summary of the “primary hampers” which all of us have experienced at the hands of gamesmen. (There is a helpful “Sketch Plan to show specimen wrong route from Maida Vale to Dulwich Covered Courts.”) While touching on “clothesmanship” and “stakesmanship” the author sounds a note of warning against the counter-gamesman, and readers will be wise to draw wider conclusions than are suggested by the single example, the “Frith-Morteroy Counter.”

Reading on, it will seem to many gamesmen that the “Jack Rivers opening” is weak. I prefer the more deadly “Huntercombe” variant (not mentioned by Potter) which goes like this. On the first tee: Gamesman: “I say, did you see that article of Cotton’s in the ‘Lancet’?” Opponent: “No, what did he say?” Gamesman: “Well it seems you breathe in on your upswing and out on the downswing, and the point is I’m sure he’s wrong. I do just the opposite. Let’s see what we really do during this round and we can write in a letter shooting him down.”

Potter is on firmer ground in his remarks on “Basic Fluke Play” and I concur when he states categorically that there are only eighteen ways of saying “Bad luck”; but many will think that his chapters on Brinkmanship, Clubmanship, etc., are amateurish and even naive, and readers will have little faith in his rudimentary advice to card players. (He does not even touch on “Voice Control” in husband and wife partnerships at the bridge table!)

I have said enough to show that, though not definitive, Potter on Gamesmanship is a Christmas “must” for partners and opponents and for anonymous despatch to “that woman” at the Bridge club. Colonel Frank Wilson’s diagrams and illustrations, particularly his anatomical chart of the golfer’s stance on the putting green (show to opponent in the third week) are in the best tradition of English Sporting Prints.

[Orion]

Even when I think " Ian, seek help" it is followed by “@Revelator thank you, SO MUCH, for sharing these” so @Revelator thank you, SO MUCH, for sharing these

[Revelator]

Haha, you’re very welcome! Ian certainly knew a disturbingly large amount about gamesmanship…

[Revelator]

Bestsellers in America: “Beautiful, Beautiful Books” (Sunday Times, Sept. 18, 1949)

By Ian Fleming

The decline in the Faculty of Attention is neither new nor peculiar to America (Wordsworth remarked upon it in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads nearly 150 years ago), but America has developed to a finer art than we the technique of attracting without actually engaging attention. Hollywood, the Tabloids, the Comics, the Shiny magazines, the Digests, Radio and “Video” provide a daily dish of premasticated pulp which is rapidly conditioning the American palate away from any mental fare whose absorption requires an effort. (Hollywood is filming The Forsyte Saga under the title of That Forsyte Gal because “Saga” is considered a “difficult” word.)

In order to sell their 15s. novels (the standard price), American book-factories (as opposed to reputable publishers) tempt the reluctant reader’s appetite by pressure-salesmanship of brightly wrappered sop-stuff—the title of this report is from a well-known blurb—with the result that writers and readers “with teeth in them are a rapidly dying race in America.”

James Marquand, for instance, has at last produced that bedtime story in swansdown prose towards which some of his recent work has, alas, been hinting. Point of No Return, which has led the fiction bestsellers for months past, is an agreeable meander through the life and pale loves of a character who closely resembles that American comic ineffectual, Mr. Milquetoast. These are harsh words, but from a sincere admirer of H. M. Pulham, Esq. and So Little Time.

Leading the general list is Cheaper by the Dozen (coming from Heinemann on October 10), a most engaging piece of real-life whimsy which describes the methods used to educate the 12 children of Mr. Gilbreth, an American consulting engineer and efficiency expert. Written by two of his children, it comes in much the same package as The Egg and I, which sold a million in America last year and has since done very well over here. Some religious books are being widely read, and there are many popular pink pills for pale psyches, such as Peace of Soul, Peace of Mind, The Mature Mind and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

It is sad to have to predict that admirers of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 will find themselves disappointed with The Rage to Live, the wearisome chronicle of a Pennsylvania family with a viper named Grace Caldwell in its bosom. This windy saga is not redeemed by extreme coarseness in parts, and it has the worst contrived ending of any novel I can remember.

Another casualty is Marc Brandel, whose adult and macabre Ides of Summer found him a discriminating English public last year. The Barriers Between is full of the turgid ruminations of a sensitive ex-G.I., whose heavy drinking in Mexico is too much for his sensitive stomach.

It is pleasant to be able to record that English authors continue in handsome demand. Mr. Churchill’s Their Finest Hour still outstrips all domestic war memoirs published this year and qualifies him for his newest laurels as chief literary dollar-earner for England (and top scrivener, for Sir Stafford!). George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is also having a phenomenal success. Featured by Life and then by The Reader’s Digest, this brilliant book is more than repeating its reception in England. Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate is a best-seller, as was her The Pursuit of Love, despite the unfamiliar idiom and cliquishness of this comedy of lost manners. Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral is proving an excellent corrective to the American popular theory that we never fought the Japanese.

Finally, a book which will do much for our battered self-esteem, Our English Heritage, by Gerald Johnson. Mr. Commager, in The New York Times, concludes a review which would make all England blush with the words: “Every nation inherits a good part of its culture and its institutions. The United States has been fortunate because its inheritance comes from a nation whose peculiar contribution to civilisation has been integrity of character.”

---

Note: The Hollywood film of The Forsyte Saga was eventually titled That Forsyte Woman. Released in 1949, it starred Errol Flynn, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young.

I haven’t read H. M. Pulham, Esq. (or anything else by the now-forgotten John P. Marquand), but I can recommend the film version, directed by the great King Vidor and starring the brainy and beautiful Hedy Lamarr.

[Revelator]

Eldollarado: A Transient’s Scrapbook from New York (Sunday Times, June 28, 1953)

From Ian Fleming.

Tipping is a pestiferous business and it would be a wonderful thing if U.N.E.S.C.O. or the U.N. Commission on Human Rights would establish a World Tipping Code. On my last night in the Ocean Belle my advice on the subject was sought by a group of three American couples bearing names which you would know.

My eyes started from my head as each couple showed its hand. “I always give my cabin steward £20.” “We’ve done a lot of entertaining in the Veranda Grill and we’re dividing £40 between the head waiter and the two others” “Would £5 be enough for the Turkish Bath man?” “And what about you?”

I was torn between various emotions. My feelings for the working-man triumphed. “I think you’re being very generous,” I said. “You’ll certainly all get an extra couple of teeth in the farewell smile.”

Under cover of their rather thin laughter I escaped with my pair of jacks unseen. For the four nights, I tipped my cabin steward £2. He seemed perfectly happy.

These Names Make Bad News

For a time the Coronation (“It’s going to mean a great religious revival round the world” is a comment I have heard several times) ousted McCarthy as topic “A” in New York and I believe throughout America, but now he is top-billing again, and you simply can’t stop talking about him or reading about him.

There are various reasons for this: he has a really expert publicity machine, he is always springing or cooking-up a new surprise, people are terrified and fascinated by him, and “he may be a sonofabitch but, darn it, he’s always right.” Homosexuals in the State Department, British ships trading with China, un-American books in American embassies abroad.

Each scandalous broadside has missed with ninety-nine calumnies and hit with one. And that one is enough in a country where every man is born with a chance to be President and where, in consequence, every man aches to prove the Administration wrong. McCarthy is just pressing the trigger of a gun which is loaded and aimed by a huge cross-section of the public.

Walter Winchell has been doing much the same thing for thirty years, and he goes on doing it on radio and TV to a guaranteed public of around ten million every week. Is there a connection between them? And what role does Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. play in all this, the Washington Fouché who has controlled the American secret police for the amazing span of twenty-seven years? These three men are the recipients of all the private grudges of America. They are the overt and covert crusaders against un-Americanism. The sun would indeed be darkened if history were to bring them together, or any closer together, before this giant country has found itself.

Tales from Kinseyland

But August 20 is K-Day and on that morning one topic will sweep away all others. For on that day will be published Dr. Kinsey’s “Sexual Report on the Human Female,” and on that day every newspaper, every dinner-table, will go hog-wild.

The Report is completed and scarifying tales and rumours are leaking out of the peaceful, beautiful campus of Indiana University where what might be described as semesters are being held to allow newspaper and magazine men (and women) to digest the huge tome and squeeze out the meatiest three-thousand word thesis for release in each paper on K-Day. Not a word more than 3,000 or someone will reach for a lawyer.

So far two semesters have been held. One in May and one in June. And there is another to come.

Jottings on a Nylon Cuff

Canasta has become the favourite card game of America, leading Contract Bridge by ten per cent.—a wide margin. Bolivia is the name of a new variation I do not intend to learn. Bolivia is really a standardisation of Samba, which I have also eschewed. Three packs. Going-out requires a sequence canasta and a regular canasta. Wild card canastas score 2,500 points. Black threes left in your hand cost a hundred points each against you. Game is 15,000 points. Who do you think is touring America promoting it? Who but that Queen of the Green Baize, our old friend Ottilie H. Reilly.

…

The latest and most deadly way of making a dry martini is to pour a little dry vermouth into a jug, swirl it round and throw it down the sink. Fill Jug with gin and place in ice-box until tomorrow. Then serve (or drink from Jug). Note that there is no wasteful dilution with ice-cubes.

…

The germ-consciousness of America is rapidly becoming a phobia, battened on by doctors, druggists and advertisers. People actually prefer foods that are frozen or tinned or preserved. They are more hygienic. And what about this? Brown eggs are virtually unobtainable in New York. “Customers won’t touch ‘em,” my Super-Market told me. “They’re dirty.”

Fifty-cent Angels

Broadway Angels Inc. has made a Common Stock issue of 570,000 shares at fifty cents a share to allow “the small investor an opportunity to employ funds in diversified enterprises connected with the Broadway Theatre.” The stock will be traded on the “Over-the-Counter-Market.” The issue was made on March 1 and the President of the Company, a Mr. Wallace Garland, tells me it is already three-quarters subscribed by some 2,000 investors.

“Of course, you can lose 100 per cent. of the capital invested in one show,” said Mr. Garland. “But look at Voice of the Turtle, 3,000 per cent, profit. Mister Roberts, 500 per cent profit. Harvey, 4,000 per cent, profit. Do you think the British would be interested?”

“I’m sure they would be,” I said. “I’ll tell them about it.”

(P.S. Show Business tells me that normally the angel has a thirty-seventy chance of making his money back. And of course, there’s Treasury permission to get. But it would be fine to own a piece of Ethel Merman.)

[Dustin]

Hilarious glimpses at that far-away country of yesteryear. Thanks for sharing, @Revelator.

[Revelator]

Questions of Colour (Times Literary Supplement, January 01, 1954)

By Ian Fleming

Fernando Henriques: Family and Colour in Jamaica. With a Preface by Meyer Fortes. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 18s.

There are about 250 million Negroes in the world and one of the great problems of this and future generations lies in promoting their happiness and well-being. Over the centuries, this will only be achieved by an extension of the colour bar so that part of the earth’s surface—perhaps the African continent—becomes a Negro dominion or reserve, or else by progressive removal of the colour bar until, through miscegenation, the entire population of the world is coffee-coloured. In England, until very recently, we barely perceived the problem. The solitary blackamoor was a nursery figure, a pet. In the plural he was a horde of fuzzy-wuzzies to be handled with glass beads or machine-guns.

But suddenly, almost since the war, the picture has changed; or rather our eyes, educated in humanity by the twentieth-century blaze of social enlightenment, see it differently. Suddenly we perceive the Negro as a tragically unhappy man ridden by a sense of inferiority which accompanies him, like a deformity, from the schoolroom to the grave. In our sympathy we lavish education and culture and medicine upon him only to be pained when, with advancement, he reaches for the weapons we once used against him and turns them upon us—weapons of legal and political argument, weapons of “giant powder” and steel. Floundering, we bomb him in one colony and in another invite him to fork-lunches at the Residency. Here he is a tool of Moscow, there he gets the O.B.E. Now he is pacified with a new constitution, then he is threatened with a battleship. Whichever way we attempt to disintegrate the black cloud on the horizon, it still remains larger than a man’s hand and, to those who think about it, just as menacing as if it were shaped like a mushroom.

Mr. Henriques is a social anthropologist and, while he might be indulgent towards these generalizations, in Family and Colour in Jamaica it has been his concern to focus a microscope over a small portion of this black cloud and to provide a detailed field-study of the mesh of colour relationships that exist even in a community as politically advanced and socially enlightened as Jamaica. The result is not only a valuable contribution to social science but a work of general interest, written with intelligence and sympathy.

The author, himself a member of a famous Jamaican family still prominent in the island, is lecturer in social anthology in the University of Leeds. It was thus not difficult for him to return to Jamaica and move among the people with intimacy and yet with eyes wide open. He concentrated on the County of Portland and its capital, Port Antonio, and his minute focus on the habits of and customs of this parish provides some of his most interesting passages of descriptive reporting. But it is his examination of the minutiae of colour relationships within Negro society that brings out the bitter colour warfares that accompany the usual economic class struggles.

“Colour,” he emphasizes, “is evaluated in terms of actual colour, hair formation, features and skin textures,” allowing for infinite combinations all of which have social significance. Thus, a dark person with “good” hair and features ranks above a fairer person with “bad” hair and features, and so on. Families become divided on colour lines, but in other spheres there are even greater frustrations. Choice of a career, promotion, public and private acceptance by others, marriage, in fact all social position is largely determined by colour. Even poverty plays a secondary part. Always there is that dreadful moment, generally at school, when some incident on the playground, some remark overheard in the street, will suddenly bring home to the little black boy that the fair boy will have the advantage of him for the rest of his life. It is no wonder that the conclusions reached by this stimulating and humane author are not encouraging, and the only disappointing feature of the book lies in the absence of some brave and thought-provoking suggestions for the future which would stir our minds as well as our hearts.

[Revelator]

The Deadly Tube (Sunday Times, Oct. 26, 1952)

One of Our Submarines. By Edward Young. (Hart-Davis. 18s.)

By Ian Fleming

We make terrible mistakes at the beginning of all our wars, but the worst of them is the failure to give the maximum number of people a chance to fight the enemy from the very day war is declared. The National Defence Club is hard to join. Anyone not on a waiting list gets passed, from one “Sorry, old man” to the next until his ardour and patriotism are as scuffed as his shoe leather.

To be a round peg in a round hole in wartime is rare and priceless. Edward Young was one of the fortunate. Of the three Services, the Navy is the shop most tightly closed. It has to be. Irresponsibility or inefficiency by any one man in a ship is far more dangerous and expensive than the failure of his opposite number in the normal run of service in the Army or Air Force. And the citadel of this closed shop is the Submarine Service. A week-end yachtsman, Young was graciously admitted into the R.N.V.R., and then by a fluke had a chance of volunteering for submarines. He was accepted, completed his training, moved from ship to ship just, it seemed, as the one he left was doomed, was given the first R.N.V.R. command in the history of submarines, and dodged depth-charges and disaster in the same ship until he ended the war in her with the rank of Commander and with the D.S.O., D.S.C. and Bar. A wonderful war for one young civilian. How many other fine men were lost on the clumsy machine?

One Of Our Submarines is in the very highest rank of books about the last war. Submarines are thrilling beasts and Edward Young tells of four years’ adventures in them in a good stout book with excitement on every page. He writes beautifully, economically and with humour, and in the actions he commands he manages to put the reader at the voice-pipe and the periscope so that sometimes the tension is so great that one has to put the book down.

The author tells us little about himself, which is a pity, for the hints which penetrate through his modest cloak of self-effacement make us wish for more of his personal reactions as he climbed towards the final solitary pinnacle of command. It is interesting that when he reaches that pinnacle the writing seems to become slightly constrained and the earlier attractive freedom of comment and expression gives place to the voice of authority as he takes his deadly tube against the Japanese.

To anyone who has served in submarines it will not be surprising that the little communities he describes are so happy and so closely knit. A sociologist would probably say that the ship’s company of a submarine represents the highest form of democratic unity—from fifty to a hundred men, the duties of each one vital to the safety of all of them, social barriers impossible, discipline automatic and perfectly comprehended, successes and failures completely shared and always the subconscious framework of permanent danger to override and control the selfish instincts of the individual.

All this comes out in One of Our Submarines and the book is a fine tribute to a happy and gallant Service. But what a wonderful setting for a novel—a Caine Mutiny of the Submarine Service! Mr. Young is exceptionally qualified to write it.

[Revelator]

The Sun Went In (Sunday Times, July 28, 1957)

Man The Ropes. By Augustine Courtauld. (Hodder & Stoughton. 12s. 6d.)

This is the autobiography of a man upon whom it seemed that the sun would always shine.

It is true that innumerable governesses and school-masters beat Augustine Courtauld for various types of rebellion, and that much of his later life consisted of getting in and out of scrapes with authority and equally uneven battles with resistentialist sun, ice, rock and sea: but the tough, gay quixotry of Augustine Courtauld always won.

At one time, in 1931, when the world’s press was full of the youth missing for five months in an ice hut in the Arctic, it seemed that here was another Edgar Christian destined to a young, lonely death in the midst of one of those tom-boy expeditions into the Frozen North. But his hero, Gino Watkins, soon himself to die in the Arctic, found Courtauld as Courtauld knew he would.

There were more adventures in the Arctic; then marriage to Mollie Montgomery, and to Duet, his dream-ship, which is still part of the family. Then came the war. To me these are the best chapters: when Courtauld, Polar Medal, Watchkeeper’s Certificate and all tried to enroll in the exclusive club that was the Navy and could get no further than a Civil Servant’s job in the Naval Intelligence Division. He was put in the Scandinavian Section, which was in charge of an expert on Egypt. One day the latest intelligence on the Swedish Fleet was asked for. Courtauld hunted through the files and produced a solitary, dog-eared “secret report” dated many years previously, which announced that “owing to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease the manoeuvres of the Swedish main fleet would be cancelled.” Many such incidents went into Courtauld’s early attempts to win the war and they make splendid, ironical reading. At last he got into M.T.B.s and then into the abortive Arctic Commando under “Red” Ryder, the V.C. of St. Nazaire, which ended with the murder in Belsen of the small party which finally got to Norway. Courtauld was transferred to a destroyer and then to ferrying landing-craft across the Atlantic.

VE Day came and Courtauld went back to his family, to Spencers, his beautiful house in Essex, and to Duet. It looked as if the sun would go on shining for him until suddenly the Almighty decided that Courtauld’s life had been too happy. He turned off the sunshine. Christopher, the eldest boy of six children, caught polio, from which it took the Courtaulds three years to rescue him. Neuritis struck Augustine and put him in a wheelchair, for the rest of his life. Mollie had a long nervous breakdown. The storms of Fate blew and went on blowing.

Now at last the skies have cleared again and the battered ship is back on an even keel. This splendid, gay little book of very English adventures is one of the results. All Augustine Courtauld’s life is in the Masefield quotation from which the title comes:

The power of man is as his hopes
In darkest night, the cocks are crowing.
With the sea roaring and the wind blowing;
Adventure. Man the ropes.

[Orion]

I do love how Fleming kept a narrative structure to his criticism. Makes a nice change from today’s “reckons” “hot takes” and “finks”

[Revelator]

Amen! It helps that Fleming had the liberty to review books that personally interested him.
Thanks to the internet both good and bad critical writing have exponentially increased, but the clickbait and hot takes seem to drown out the honest critics.