Fionn Morgan

Thursday

Fionn Morgan

Ian Fleming: cruel? Selfish? Misogynistic? Nonsense, says his step-daughter

From our UK edition

When from my eyrie beneath the Christ Corcovado I looked closely at this (unusually) typed letter from Ian Fleming I saw that it was ‘dictated in his absence’ and that it must have been sent by the devoted ‘Griffie’, model for Miss Moneypenny. Scarcely surprising: five days later, on the 12th birthday of his only child Caspar, Ian — as much a father to me as a stepfather — died from a third massive heart attack. (‘I am sorry to have troubled you like this,’ he said to the ambulancemen who took him to Kent & Canterbury hospital.) That too was not unexpected. Early in 1963 I left for Rio de Janeiro, where my husband John Morgan had been posted as commercial attaché.

Friday

Fionn Morgan

Beautiful, dandified detachment

From our UK edition

‘Christmas without Ian,’ wrote my mother, ‘was a bleak affair. He was always there at Christmas.’ My mother was Ann Fleming and Ian the man the centennial of whose birth we have so markedly been celebrating this past year. There was another man who was always there at Christmas: Peter Quennell, of whom Paul Johnson wrote in these pages, ‘There has never been another bruiser like Behan or writing toff like Quennell’ (‘And Another Thing’, 6 September 2008). Peter Quennell, or P. Q. as his fourth wife, Spider, called him, was not born a toff. (Spider was christened Sonia, but on account of the length of her elegant limbs Peter named her Spider Monkey; and so she remains.) P. Q.’s father had been an architect. His mother was an artist.