FLEMING, Ian.

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Manuscript notebook for Thrilling Cities and You Only Live Twice. One of the very last pieces of significant Fleming manuscript material in private hands: the extensive notes Fleming made on his round-the-world tour in 1959, during which he visited Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, and Hawai'i. Fleming drew on these notes for Thrilling Cities and, more substantially, You Only Live Twice.Fleming undertook the trip as one of his final assignments for the Sunday Times. The features editor, Leonard Russell, commissioned a series of articles on the world's most glamorous cities; Fleming initially declined, but was persuaded by the prospect of gathering material for the Bond novels. He carried the notebook throughout the trip, filling it with vivid, telling impressions of each city, as well as schedules, addresses, telephone numbers, and practical foreign-language phrases ("Moshimosh = hello!", "GOKUHI = Top Secret"). The resulting notes, a combination of travel diary and literary commonplace book, reveal both his remarkable eye for detail and his painstaking creative process. The trip begins with a layover in Beirut ("a sprawl of twinkling hundreds & thousands under a theatrically new moon that swayed from heavens to ground as the comet turned in to land"), before continuing to Hong Kong. There, he met his friend Richard Hughes, the inspiration for Dikko Henderson in You Only Live Twice and one of the novel's dedicatees. Fleming's notes convey his fascination with the city: the Lok Kwok Ho

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