The Man Who Saved Britain

by SimonWinder (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $12.66

  After victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatized country. Simon Winder, born into this nation of uncertain identity, fell in love (as many before and since) with the man created as the antidote, a quintessentially British figure of great cultural significance: James Bond. Written with passion, wit and a great deal of personal insight and affection, this book is his wildly amusing attempt to get to grips with Bond's legacy and the difficult decades in which it really mattered.

  `A more entertaining tour of 007, and the period associations that get sucked into Winder's great comic intelligence, is hard to imagine' London Review of Books

  `Diversions for the general reader and delights for the Bond enthusiast' Sunday Times

  `A delightfully quirky, immediately engaging book' Scotland on Sunday

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.51

  `This is a brilliant look at the British Empire, and its fall, as reflected in the gadget-filled, babe-bagging, martini-swilling, world-saving career of James Bond. It's utterly unique. Sly, funny, occasionally sad, a wild mix of cultural history, film criticism, and memoir in which the author, trying to fathom the disorienting collapse of his parents' world, finds the key in the somewhat daft (Winder's word) creation of Ian Fleming. It burns from beginning to end' Rich Cohen, author of Sweet and Low

  `Winder pulls it off with fizzing enjoyment . . . His talent for pitch-perfect depreciative comedy fully justifies this aim. When he's not Swift, he's Twain' Sunday Telegraph

  `A book of eccentric brilliance that covers everything from Jamaica as lieu de memoire to the sexual magnetism of General Nasser' Times Literary Supplement

  `A hilarious blend of cultural history, biography and memoir' Guardian

  `An entertaining yomp through the literary and cinematic heartland of James Bond country' Sunday Times

  `A diverting book of true fanaticism' Metro

  `Almost ridiculously enjoyable' New Statesman

  `A delightfully quirky, immediately engaging book' Scotland on Sunday