FLEMING, Ian.

£30,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

You Only Live Twice. First edition, first impression, presentation copy to Cyril Connolly, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To 'Great Ox' Connolly-san, from 'Butterfly' Fleming-san". Fleming's inscription incorporates the Japanese honorary title "san", which he also used in the novel: Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese Secret Service, refers to 007 throughout as "Bondo-san".Fleming and Connolly met briefly at Eton, and again 16 years later in Kitzbühel, Austria, when "Connolly arrived in town in pursuit of a woman... who turned out to be Ian's first girlfriend" (Lycett, p. 92). Over subsequent years, Fleming "grew to like Connolly - one of his few journalistic colleagues of whom that could be said - and played a part in confirming his appointment to the Sunday Times's panel of regular book reviewers" (Lycett, p. 224). Connolly published his novella The Missing Diplomats, concerning the Cambridge spy ring, with Fleming's Queen Anne Press in 1952. He also wrote of the first Bond pastiches, "Bond Strikes Camp" in 1963, lampooning "the duplicitous, often sexually ambivalent world of espionage, while giving voice to the often quietly held view that, for all his apparent machismo, Bond was actually rather camp" (Lycett, p. 416). Connolly hoped to playfully provoke Fleming and "expose his adolescent fantasies", but by all accounts Fleming rather enjoyed it. The following year, Connolly was one of the few men to see Fleming in his last days.You Only Live Twice

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