Donald McCormick

Through his fictional creation, James Bond, Ian Fleming achieved world-wide fame. Fleming has been seen as the archetype for Bond, the jaunty, womanizing secret agent, a somewhat self-indulgent Englishman given to rich man's pursuits. In this book Donald McCormick, who knew Ian Fleming well, sets out to disprove the stereotype playboy image. Fleming was one of four brothers. His father, a Conservative MP with a Scottish background, was killed in the Army in 1917, when Ian was nine. Consequently his mother, a dominant personality, exerted a strong influence on him. After Eton, Fleming went on to Sandhurst, but withdrew to try for the Foreign Office. He failed to enter the latter and subsequently worked in the City. In the war he came into his own and served with distinction, notably as Personal Assistant to the Director of British Naval Intelligence, with the rank of commander - signing his memoranda with the code-name '17F'. After the war he became foreign manager for Kemsley Newspapers. Following his much-acclaimed first novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, Bond books appeared regularly until his death in 1964. Donald McCormick reaches far and wide in this illuminating account of Ian Fleming's remarkable life, covering his wartime exploits and successful journalistic career as well as his marriage to Anne Rothermere and life at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. He shows Fleming as steadfast and loyal to others, but also as a restless man always seeking new talents in himself. Fleming's command of pace and innate romanticism, vital ingredients in his fiction, were ever present too in his many lifetime relationships and activities.

How does one define erotic and, more especially, erotic literature? (The origin of eroticism is the Greek erotikos, which means sexual rather than romantic love.) How has the erotic been depicted in classics of world literature? Who are the authors most associated with erotic preoccupations and themes? What are some of the terms and expressions connected with this literature? Erotic Literature: A Connoisseur's Guide sets out to answer these questions. In the process it covers both the "usual" and "unusual suspects." It is an essential source book and guide to erotic literature - the joyfully erotic, ancient and modern - as opposed to the merely pornographic. The book is divided into three main sections. The first consists of six chapters on the subject: The Greeks and the Romans; The Far East and Middle East; Courtly Love and Medieval Forms of Love; The Era of Erotic Memoirs (the eighteenth century to our own time); Eroticism in code in all eras; and The Maze of Modern Erotica. Part 2 is an A-to-Z listing of erotic authors, with biographical and critical material on each one. The third part is a glossary of erotic terms. This lively and informative book will answer many questions on the nature and unique place of erotica in literature, both in times past and today.

The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman's courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn's heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband's psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.Carolyn's every move was dictated by her husband's whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse--at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife's compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop's flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.

YOU are a spy codenamed Scorpio. Arch-villain Sebastien Mammon has seized control of laser satellites orbiting the Earth. He's going to destroy key capital cities, starting with London, if you don't stop him ... This is a title in the interactive I HERO Immortals series - where the reader is the hero!