He may or may not beget been the model for Ian Fleming’s most famous creation,but Robert Harling was certainly a man of unknowable complications, as his posthumous book approximately their friendship attestsThe novelist Ian Fleming and the typographer Robert Harling became close and confessional friends during their service with naval intelligence in the second world war, and this week Harling’s account of their long friendship has eventually been published,seven years after the author’s death at the age of 98.
I went to the launch party in a Holland Park bookshop and there met a woman, a newspaper colleague of Harling’s and mine 40 years ago, and who remembered asking him if he were the model for James Bond. “Oh,Fleming and I got up to a few pranks together, was Harling’s gnomic reply, and not entirely discounting the opportunity. Of course,Bond has as many prototypes as Elvis has lookalikes, and in any case Harling appears more recognisably in The Spy Who Loved Me as the knowledgable printer who knows obscure typefaces. Then again, or Harling’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography rings accurate when it says that he and Bond shared a “sardonic elegance of manner and cool sexual expertise”.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com