Muggeridge was a genius at this: he often took the opposite view from everyone else, and presented it caustically and memorably. He was one of the best-known journalists and critics of his time, and a powerful voice in British cultural life: he was the host of several BBC programmes, deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, and the editor of Punch. A few weeks before bumping into The Beatles in Hamburg he had interviewed Oswald Mosley, the former leader of the British Union of Fascists, for Granada Television, and talked to the sculptor Henry Moore at a meeting of the Tate Gallery Brains Trust.

In 1932, Muggeridge travelled to Moscow. He went there a Communist, but his experiences in the Soviet Union changed his mind. To his credit, he was one of the first Western journalists to report on the famine in the Ukraine, and he continued to do so even when it was politically inexpedient for him. He left the Soviet Union shortly after several British engineers were arrested on charges of espionage by the Soviet government and The Manchester Guardian downplayed his reports about the subject. He left before their trial began, and so did not meet Ian Fleming, who had been sent out by Reuters to cover it. But the two men met 20 years later. In late 1952, Muggeridge was offered the job as editor of Punch, which he accepted. Shortly afterwards, he had lunch with his wife Kitty and an old acquaintance, Lady Rothermere, who had recently divorced her husband to marry Fleming. Muggeridge noted in his diary:

‘Ian gave me a slight pang by saying there had been talk of making me Editor of the Sunday Times. Ian definitely a slob, and difficult to see why Ann fell for him.’

I think it’s possible there’s a link between those two sentences. Fleming worked for The Sunday Times, and had just told Muggeridge that he may have had the opportunity of editing it. This was a much more prestigious job than the editorship of Punch, but it was too late for Muggeridge to do anything about it. But, thanks to Fleming, he would always know he had missed out. Muggeridge may have held the bearer of the news responsible, especially if Fleming had told him it maliciously, or if Muggeridge felt he had. Despite claiming to have had just a ‘slight pang’ at hearing this, Muggeridge was not always entirely forthright in his diaries, and it may be that this perceived slight festered over the years. Muggeridge met Fleming on many subsequent occasions, but perhaps this first unfavourable impression of him hardened. It may not have been improved by Fleming’s increasing success.

There’s no harm in disliking or envying Ian Fleming, of course: plenty of people did. But I think it’s clear that on account of his personal animosity towards Fleming Malcolm Muggeridge repeatedly attacked his work in public, using his considerable reputation as a critic to make it all the more damaging.

While at The Sunday Times, Fleming had suggested in an editorial meeting that the paper commission a series of essays on the seven deadly sins, with well-known authors each tackling a different sin. In 1962, this idea was used, and Fleming arranged for the essays to be published in book form in the United States. He also wrote a foreword for it, in which he explained the genesis of the book:

‘The project was outside my own sphere of action on the paper and I heard nothing more of it until I had left the Sunday Times to concentrate on writing thrillers centred round a member of the British Secret Service called James Bond. So I cannot describe what troubles the Literary Editor ran into in his endeavours to marry the Seven Deadly Sins to seven appropriate authors. So far as I can recall, the marriages I myself had suggested were closely followed, except that I had suggested Mr Malcolm Muggeridge to write on the theme of Anger on the grounds that he is such an extremely angry man.’

W.H. Auden wrote on anger instead, but it’s not clear whether Muggeridge was asked or not. Muggeridge viewed himself as a noble iconoclast and famously had a thin sense of humour, so he may have viewed the request to write an essay on anger as a sleight. Had Fleming proposed this as a genuine brainwave, the famously caustic Muggeridge let loose on the topic of anger, or had it been a dig? We don’t know, but while Fleming’s post-mortem of the idea in the foreword to the book is amusing, it might not have seemed so to Muggeridge. As we’ll see, he was indeed an extremely angry man. And before long, Ian Fleming would be a target for his anger.

Two years later, Ian Fleming died. Four months after his death, in December 1964, the American men’s magazine Esquire published an article by Muggeridge in the regular book column he wrote for it:

‘By curious coincidence, I decided to read my first James Bond book (You Only Live Twice, New American Library, $4.50) with a view to writing about it in this column, just about a week before Fleming died. Indeed, I was actually mulling the piece over in my mind when I heard on the radio that he was dead. Though we were never exactly friends, I used to see quite a bit of him at one time.’

Despite admitting to having read just one of Fleming’s 12 Bond novels, in the long article that follows Muggeridge attacked Fleming’s work as a whole, as well as the man himself:

‘He knew the requisite ingredients for a dish to set before (his readers)—money, sex and snobbishness, beaten into a fine rich batter, with plenty of violence to make it rise in the pan; then served hot and flambé with Sade flavoring, and washed down by a blood-red wine. A true chef, he dished up himself, flushed with bending over the oven. That flush which so often comes to the rich and the avid! I suppose in poor Fleming’s case it was due to the heart condition of which he died, but somehow I always saw it as the pigment with which he colored in Bond.’

The first part of this passage is a dramatic rephrasing of the charges made against Fleming in 1958 by Johnson and Bergonzi, and as it can only be based on the one Bond novel Muggeridge had read, has to be discounted. The latter part of the passage is personal, and rather unpleasant considering Fleming had only died in August. With the lead-in times required by magazines like Esquire, Muggeridge had probably written this several weeks or perhaps even months before December.

This passage also comes after six long paragraphs in which Muggeridge was at pains to show that, while he was ‘never exactly friends’ with Fleming, they were well acquainted. He explained how he had known Ann, who been married to Lord Rothermere ‘before going off with Fleming, or Bond as he already was in embryo’:

‘Bond had a sort of private apartment at the top of the house where he kept his golf clubs, pipes and other masculine bric-a-brac. We would sit up there together sipping a highball; like climbers taking a breather above a mountain torrent whose roar could still faintly be heard in the ravine below. This was before the Bond series began, but I well remember his telling me about his plans for writing the first one (Casino Royale), which he deliberately intended to be exciting, successful, lucrative and, as he scornfully remarked, not in the least “literary”. Well, as it turned out, he achieved his purpose to a fabulous degree. The Bond books have so far provided excitement for some eighteen million readers and heaven knows how many film-goers; they have certainly proved successful, and lucrative, and no one (except, perhaps, Kingsley Amis) could possibly contend that they were “literary”.’

Muggeridge was, of course, in no position to judge whether Fleming’s novels were literary or not, as by his own admission he had only read one. Fleming was sometimes self-deprecating about his literary worth, but it’s clear from his conversation with Raymond Chandler on the BBC and elsewhere that he had a firm understanding of how thrillers could aim higher, and wished to do so himself. In his 1962 article How To Write A Thriller, for example, he wrote:

‘I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “thrillers designed to be read as literature”, whose practitioners have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these writers.’

Next, Muggeridge attacked the consumer ethic in the Bond novels:

‘Partly, too, though, Fleming really was Bond, who truly represented all his hopes and desires. He wanted Bond to be this rusé chap who knew what was what, where to go for what. Bond in Bond Street. (Was that, by the way, the derivation of the name? I never asked Fleming, but it might well be so, Bond Street being the repository of the very expensive, very English haberdashery, etc., nowadays sold almost exclusively to Americans.)’

Having admitted he had read only one Bond novel and that he was an acquaintance of Fleming, Muggeridge felt qualified to state that Bond ‘truly represented’ all Fleming’s hopes and desires. He also had the cheek to criticize Fleming for creating a character with good taste who knew where to find the best things in life in an article in Esquire, a magazine largely dedicated to such pursuits. Note the way he switched between scorning Fleming for wanting Bond to know ‘where to go for what’ and then does the very same thing himself, informing his American readers that Bond Street is the place to go if you want expensive English haberdashery. He then condescended to the same readers by suggesting the street wasn’t quite what it used to be because it had taken to selling ‘almost exclusively to Americans’. This is snobbery.

Muggeridge also seems to have been pleased with himself for spotting a possible connection between Bond and Bond Street, wondering whether that might have been the derivation of the character’s name. It wasn’t—Fleming took the name from the author of Birds of the West Indies—but if Muggeridge had read On Her Majesty’s Secret Service he might have found an intriguing discussion of the topic there. It’s in the chapter titled ‘Bond of Bond Street?’.

After boasting that he once attended an MI6 meeting at the Garrick Club at which Fleming had been present, Muggeridge went on to claim that Fleming may have been ‘the last true fan’ of the British Secret Service and a ‘valiant chronicler’ of its activities. And yet when he finally gets around to ‘reviewing’ You Only Live Twice in the piece, Muggeridge is disappointed that the portrait of MI6 is not valiant, with Bond’s mission to get a look in at Japanese cipher traffic that the Americans already have access to, ‘or something like that’:

‘It’s all rather a muddle, and scarcely in the highest tradition of Secret Service fiction.’

Having set up a straw man, he is disappointed to find it doesn’t exist. After mentioning that he has ‘no intention’ of reading any further Bond novels, although he did ‘turn over the pages of Thrilling Cities’ (which he didn’t find thrilling), Muggeridge ended his article with a final attack on the man himself:

‘Like so many of his class he never grew up; a Peter Pan of the bordellos; a gentleman junkie and Savile Row beat; a Blade of Blades.’

Five months later, on May 30 1965, The Observer in Britain published another article on Bond by Muggeridge. Nominally a review of Kingsley Amis’s book The James Bond Dossier, it recycled and reworked much of the Esquire article. Muggeridge had delivered on his promise in Esquire not to read any further Bond novels, which he now boasted about:

‘With his accustomed Eng. Lit. expertise, Mr Kingsley Amis has produced, in his The James Bond Dossier, a primer which will enable anyone of average intelligence to reach O-level standard without having to open a single Fleming book—a dispensation for which I am profoundly grateful.’

It’s a tenet of literary criticism that it is unacceptable to review work you haven’t read. Muggeridge joked about it, and encouraged other ‘students’ of Bond to use Amis’ book as a shorthand ‘cheat sheet’ to mug up on Fleming’s novels instead of reading them.

Worse, Muggeridge clearly hadn’t even bothered to read Amis’s book! Although he was supposed to be reviewing it, he didn’t mention a single specific thing about its contents. The James Bond Dossier was an extended argument for Fleming’s gifts as a writer and his right to a place in the canon, and Amis explicitly took on the absurdly misplaced moralizing of earlier attacks, which Muggeridge now echoed without even realizing Amis had already countered them.

Muggeridge also mentioned Mickey Spillane, on the grounds that he was also a very successful writer who ‘may be said to work in the same genre’ as Fleming. After noting a few superficial similarities between the jacket designs of Fleming and Spillane’s novels—very superficial, as they were both thriller-writers—Muggeridge sarcastically asked whether readers might expect ‘a detailed comparison between their two oeuvres one day from Mr Amis’. But Amis directly compared Fleming to Spillane in the second chapter of his book, and made it clear he didn’t feel Spillane was worth much further consideration. Muggeridge might have taken his own advice, and used Amis’ book as a cheat-sheet—but even that seems to have been too much effort. Instead, he chose once again to make several blanket statements condemning the novels:

‘In so far as one can focus on so shadowy and unreal a character, [Bond] is utterly despicable: obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, toward whom sexual appetite represents the only approach…’

Other than the claim he has pretentious tastes, none of these charges are true. Bond is not a sadist: his enemies are. Obsequious to his superiors? Bond is frequently resentful of authority in Fleming’s work, for example drafting his resignation letter in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and countermanding a direct order in The Living Daylights. In the latter story, Bond’s mission is to assassinate a Soviet sniper, who turns out to be a woman. Despite her being a stranger to him, an enemy agent, and one of his colleagues being dependent on her being put out of action, Bond cannot bring himself to kill her in cold blood. That’s far from callous or brutal. The story ends with Bond saying that if M were to sack him he would thank him for it. No doubt some women Bond comes into contact with in the novels would regard him as a cad, but he doesn’t simply have sex on his mind: he falls in love with at least two women, one of whom he marries.

After recycling his misleading synopsis of You Only Live Twice, Muggeridge ended the article—in for a penny—with yet another personal attack on Fleming the man, saying that he felt a ‘pang’ on hearing of his death, not, like Amis, because it meant that there would be no new Bond adventures, but because ‘it seemed a pity that Fleming’s life should have been expended on peddling dreams so unillumined’:

‘I thought of his Thunderbird car and other props, of the exaggerated impression of shirt-cuff he always created, of the indifferent drinks he so elaborately mixed and the inaccurate travelling lore (set forth so unthrillingly in “Thrilling Cities”) he so eagerly purveyed; of his woebegone left eye, and of Mr Connery and the monstrous regiment of girls. Alas! Yet (as Dr Johnson justly observes) why alas, since life is such?’

This article prompted an extremely stern letter to the editor of The Observer from the usually even-tempered Peter Fleming, who was Ian’s elder brother, ward of his literary estate and a best-selling writer himself:

‘Sir—The curiously unpleasant article about my brother to which you gave such prominence last week was a rewrite of a similar piece which Mr Muggeridge contributed to the American magazine Esquire several months ago. I assume you did not see the original version. If you had, there are various grounds on which you might have thought twice about publishing the stuff.’

He went on to detail several problems with the article. He pointed out that The Observer had stated that they had invited Muggeridge, who ‘had strong views on the subject’ to comment on ‘the whole Bond cult’. But in the Esquire version of the article, Muggeridge had stated that he had only read one Bond novel and had no intention of reading any more. Peter also pointed out that Muggeridge had laden his article with personal abuse, crediting his brother with ‘squalid aspirations’ in The Observer piece and calling him a ‘Peter Pan of the bordellos’ in Esquire. And, he noted, Muggeridge had been remarkably sly in his attack:

‘There is one significant aspect in which the two versions of the diatribe differed, and which might have jeopardized Mr Muggeridge’s chances of promotion from the back pages of Esquire to the front page of The Observer Weekend Review. To an American public Mr Muggeridge was prepared, and indeed appeared anxious, to reveal that he knew my brother well, was a great friend of his wife’s and had frequently enjoyed their hospitality; from British readers, who sometimes have finicky views about what is decent and what is not, he shrewdly concealed these facts. To vilify publicly, within a few months of his death, a friend from whom he had received nothing but kindness is not the sort of thing that it would occur to many of us to do; nor would a reputable literary critic pontificate at length about a writer with whose work he was almost totally unacquainted. But Mr Muggeridge’s standards of conduct have always been idiosyncratic, and for him, I imagine, the only abnormal feature of this shoddy transaction is that it has—thanks to The Observer—brought him two handsome fees instead of one.’

Muggeridge’s response in the newspaper was shameless, claiming that Peter Fleming had only pointed out ‘minor discrepancies’, painting himself as a victim and completely misrepresenting the two pieces he had written. He concluded:

‘I shall not take up the various abusive references to myself except to say that my purpose was to separate Ian Fleming whom I liked from Bond whom I abominate. Clearly, Colonel Fleming did not appreciate the endeavour.’

This sounds reasonable if you haven’t read Muggeridge’s articles: it suggests that Peter Fleming was simply over-reacting and sticking up for his brother. But far from trying to separate Ian Fleming from Bond, Muggeridge had gone out of his way to claim in Esquire that they were one and the same: ‘Partly, too, though, Fleming really was Bond, who truly represented all his hopes and desires.’ He even referred to Fleming as Bond in the piece. And it’s hard to see why he would abominate a fictional character that appeared in just one novel he had read. As a result of Muggeridge’s article and reply, Peter Fleming never contributed to The Observer for the rest of his life.

Despite this public rebuke, Muggeridge, rather astonishingly, went on to publish further versions of this article. Around a month later, on July 11, The Los Angeles Times published another review of The James Bond Dossier by Muggeridge. Billed as an exclusive, it was in fact a very light rewrite of the Esquire and Observer articles. And Muggeridge published yet another version of the same article in the August-September 1965 issue of The Critic. This time it was titled ‘The Late Mr Fleming’, and under his byline read:

‘British author, critic, former member of the British Secret Service and friend of the late Mr. Ian Fleming.’

Muggeridge might have provided this biographical snapshot himself. If so, I think the message in mentioning he was formerly in intelligence is clear: ‘I used to be a spy, so I know how things really are, not like they are in these silly books.’ And the purpose in saying he was a friend of Fleming would be to add: ‘But I knew Ian rather well, so I have a right to say I disliked him and his work intensely.’

A version of the article was also contained in a 1966 American anthology of his work, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, under the title The Century of the Common Bond.

*

Muggeridge’s article, in all its forms, was a baseless attack on Fleming’s work. If it had been a review of You Only Live Twice, it would have been a shoddy one: from his description of it I doubt he even read that novel all the way through. But he attacked the entirety of Fleming’s work, and in doing so rekindled and inflated all the old Corke/Bergonzi/Johnson nonsense, spreading it to millions more readers and entrenching it even further. Muggeridge set out to give the literary establishment more ammunition to damn Ian Fleming—for good measure, he added in as many personal insults he could think up.

In 2010, newspapers and websites around the world reported on an interview Muggeridge conducted with John le Carré on the BBC in 1966, which had been dug up from the archives and put online. In that interview, le Carré made some disparaging comments about Ian Fleming’s work—as did Muggeridge. In fact, Muggeridge goaded le Carré into insulting Fleming. Le Carré has since admitted that he felt ashamed of his behavior in the interview, telling the Radio Times: ‘I was putting on a performance and so was the Mugg. We were two fakes performing, that was the long and short of it.’ He also called Muggeridge ‘the last of TV’s upper-class, bogus, intellectual pontificators, exuding piety and superior knowledge, and adoring his canonisation.’

Muggeridge had a talent for making memorably scathing remarks, and his supercilious outrage sold newspapers and made for good television. He is still regarded in some circles as one of the pre-eminent critics of the 20th century (especially if you happen to be writing an article in which you agree with one of his conclusions), but I think John le Carré was right about him. He was a fake, and he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a critic. It is not acceptable that Muggeridge behaved this way because his target was a popular novelist, or because it was ‘only Ian Fleming’, who wasn’t much good anyway—that view is partly a result of attacks such as this. Muggeridge’s admission in print that he had only read one Bond novel discredits his literary criticism as a whole, just as a student’s body of work is discredited if it is found they have not read a work they have written about.

Under the guise of friendship and knowledge, and using his considerable reputation and reach, Malcolm Muggeridge repeatedly published and broadcast his views on his distaste for Fleming’s work. He was a prolific writer and tackled a huge number of subjects, but this was a ruthlessly pursued vendetta, a campaign to damage Fleming’s literary standing and ensure that others looked down at it as much as he must have done Fleming the man. He loaded into his articles every variation of the attacks that had previously been made on Fleming’s work and personality, amplifying them by using even more vicious phrasing for maximum impact.

And his campaign worked. Hilary Corke’s review has been forgotten, while Bernard Bergonzi’s essay is often footnoted but the contents rarely discussed. Paul Johnson’s review is still frequently cited in articles about Ian Fleming, mainly because of the title and because it was so extreme as to be noteworthy. But Muggeridge’s views were more extreme still, and have been cited over the years in Time, The Washington Post, Life, The Baltimore Sun, The Times, The Sun, The Chicago Tribune and many other publications: he and Johnson’s view of Fleming’s work has become the dominant view of it. You still hear people proclaiming loudly at parties that James Bond is a sadistic misogynistic snob in the books. In my experience, people who say or write this usually haven’t read much or any of Fleming’s work. Instead, they’ve read a few chapters of Diamonds Are Forever years ago—or have read the views of others. It’s much easier to read a couple of articles and make your mind up that way than to bother to read Fleming’s novels. But it’s not an opinion that means much.

On seeing The Beatles in Hamburg in June 1961, Muggeridge felt they were ‘bashing their instruments, and emitting nerveless sounds into microphones’. Today, we recognize that sentiment for what it was: a man then in his late fifties not equipped to understand an emerging form of popular culture, let alone recognize that it might contain the seeds of great art. Muggeridge’s views of Ian Fleming are as archaic as his view of The Beatles, and should be taken even less seriously, as it seems his opinion of The Beatles had no personal agenda but was simply based on listening to them perform.

*

In 1965, Kingsley Amis laid down a challenge in The James Bond Dossier for Fleming to be seen in a similar light to other great practitioners of popular fiction. It is now over half a century since the attacks on Fleming’s work began, and yet some still give weight, consciously or not, to the sanctimonious moralizing of critics who were both ignorant of the thriller genre, and in at least one case of Fleming’s own work.

I think it’s high time to consign the essays by Corke, Bergonzi, Johnson and Muggeridge to the dustbin, and reassess Ian Fleming’s standing as a writer of popular fiction—by giving his work the professional critical analysis it deserves.