Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. William Cook in the New Statesman considered James Bond to be "the culmination of an important but much-maligned tradition in English literature. As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel H. C. McNeile and the Richard... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. In 1914 Fleming attended Durnford School, a preparatory school on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. He did not enjoy his time at Durnford; he suffered unpalatable food, physical hardship and bullying. In May 1939 Fleming was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intellig... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer. He was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. His mother was Evelyn, and his father was Valentine Fleming, the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 to 1917. From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming is a novel centred around the infamous British MI5 spy, James Bond... Read More
Moonraker is the third novel by Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. According to the author Raymond Benson, Moonraker is a deeper and more introspective book than Fleming's previous work, which allows the author to develop the characters further. In Moonraker, Millionaire Hugo Drax cheats at cards, the highest offence in polite English society. Special... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond novels. The Bond books were written in post-war Britain when the country was still an imperial power. As the series progressed, the British Empire was in decline; journalist William Cook observed that "Bond pandered to Britain's inflated and increasingly insecure self-imag... Read More
Casino Royale is the first novel by the British author Ian Fleming. Published in 1953, it is the first James Bond book, and it paved the way for a further eleven novels and two short story collections by Fleming, followed by numerous continuation Bond novels by other authors. The first US edition of Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale was published with the title ‘You Asked for It’; it took a few... Read More
Ian Fleming, in full Ian Lancaster Fleming, was a suspense-fiction novelist whose character James Bond, the stylish, high-living British secret service agent 007, who became one of the most successful and widely imitated heroes of 20th-century popular fiction. As well as the hugely successful Bond novels, Ian Fleming also wrote the novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car, on which the 19... Read More
Colleen Margaretta McCullough was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi. Before her tertiary education, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist. In her first year of medical studies at the University of Sydney, she suffered dermatitis from surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of be... Read More
With many millions of books sold globally, Colleen McCullough was arguably Australia's most popular novelist. Best known for The Thorn Birds, she penned more than two dozen books, including the Masters of Rome. Antony and Cleopatra is the seventh and purposely last novel in Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. Mark Antony, a famous warrior and legendary lover, expected that he would be... Read More
Colleen McCullough is best known as the author of The Thorn Birds, a popular generational saga set in Australia that made publishing history as an international bestseller. Though she earned a reputation as a romance writer with this novel and Tim, McCullough has produced a diverse body of fiction in several genres, notably the psychological novel An Indecent Obsession, the dystopic fantasy A C... Read More
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British agent, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. This novel became an international best-seller. Alec Leamas is waiting in West Berlin at the Wall for Karl Riemeck to come across. Riemec... Read More
Alfred Bester was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books. He was born in Manhattan, New York City, on December 18, 1913. His father, James J. Bester, owned a shoe store and was a first-generation American whose parents were both Austrian. Bester attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of... Read More
Frederick Forsyth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seventeen novels, including The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, as well as short-story collections and a memoir. A former Air Force pilot, and one-time print and television reporter for the BBC, he has had four movies and two television miniseries made from his works. Forsyth is the winner of three Edgar Awards, and in 2012... Read More
Frederick Forsyth is an English author, political commentator and former journalist and spy. He is famous for his novels; The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fist of God, Icon, The Fourth Protocol, The Afghan, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Veteran, Avenger, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works regularly feature on best-sellers lists. Several of his books have bee... Read More
American author John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley, was a high school mathematics teacher, the model for several sympathetic father figures in Updike's early works. Because Updike's mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, had literary dreams of her own, books were a large part of the boy's early life. Updike began his remarkable career as a... Read More
American author John Updike mirrored his America in poems, short stories, essays, and novels, especially the four-volume "Rabbit" series. At the age of twenty-two, Updike began his writing career when he published his first story "Friends from Philadelphia," in the New Yorker in 1954. Since childhood, Updike had admired the New Yorker and always dreamed of becoming a cartoonist for the magazine... Read More
John Hoyer Updike was an American writer, poet, literary critic and novelist. He was born on 18th March 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Updike was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a mathematics teacher and an aspiring writer Linda Grace Hoyer. Updike’s initial desire was to become a cartoonist. To pursue this goal he entered the ‘The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts’ at the Univers... Read More
The Shining is a horror novel by American author Stephen King that was first published in 1977. It is King's third published novel and first hardback bestseller: the success of the book firmly established King as a preeminent author in the horror genre. The setting and characters are influenced by King's personal experiences, including both his visit to The Townplace Suites in Williamsport in 1... Read More
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. When King was three years old, his father, Donald Edwin King, deserted his family under the lie of "going to buy a pack of cigarettes". His mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, raised King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family m... Read More
Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist best known for the novels Midnight's Children. He studied in India and England, reading History at King's College, Cambridge. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migra... Read More