Casino Royale

Memories of David Niven

In 1967 I visited, as I often did, my uncle, who lived for twenty years in the Hotel Richemond in Geneva. From there I was flying back to London; in those far-off days the tendency among educated people was to dress up rather than down. I immediately realized that my trim, military-looking neighbor was none other than David Niven, wearing, I observed, a Rifle Brigade tie, from the regiment he patriotically joined from Hollywood at the outbreak of war in 1939. Niven, like myself, had been educated at Stowe in its early days under the founding headmaster J.F. Roxburgh.

Niven

The astonishing truth about 007

From our UK edition

The novel as a form is a fundamentally capitalist enterprise. It was invented at the same time as capitalism – Robinson Crusoe tots up his situation in the form of double-entry bookkeeping. Its interests dwell on the disparate and unequal natures of human beings and feed off rivalry, social transformation, moneymaking, profit and loss. No rigid feudal society has managed to create an effective school of novelists; and having once struggled through Cement, Fyodor Gladkov’s classic of socialist Soviet literature, I would say that systems dedicated to forcible equality also struggle.