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offer her, Her Majesty will be pleased to eat.’
The Bullards had to move out of their bedrooms in Berlin and Bonn because the royal couple were not prepared to share a bedroom – ‘even despite the newspaper headline “TOGETHER AGAIN” ’.
Prince Charles piloted the Bullards round Germany and won praise for his good German. But all was clearly not well.
‘It puzzled us why all the members of the household, including her husband, treated Diana so dismissively, even in front of us,’ writes Lady Bullard. ‘The only people in the royal party who I saw speaking to her were her lady-in-waiting and her policemen (large and fat and drank a lot of gin in their bedrooms), who behaved as if they were on very intimate terms with her. She criticised their shirts and they her hair in front of the rest of us. She was not unaware that she was annoying her husband.’
What deliciously undiplomatic gossip!
One of Ian Fleming’s less well-known ventures was The Book Collector, the literary journal he founded in 1952. The quarterly magazine still publishes articles on writing, publishing and collecting books.
When Fleming died in 1964, Nicolas Barker owned and edited the journal for over 50 years until, in 2016, ownership reverted to the Fleming family.
And now James Fleming, Ian Fleming’s nephew, the son of Ian’s brother Richard, has published Bond: Behind the Iron Curtain, under the Book Collector imprint.
James Fleming has collected Russian Communist reactions to the James Bond books. They include a hilarious 1962 review of Dr No by Yu Okov in Izvestiya, the official national publication of the Soviet Union. At the time, Dr No was being filmed in Jamaica.
Okov writes, ‘ “Some film!” the reader will say. “Who’s interested in such rubbish?” Who is Mr Ian Fleming, the