Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

Goldeneye

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Supremely enjoyable... Matthew Parker has created a completely new picture of Fleming, Bond and the role of Jamaica in the making of the legend' John Pearson, author of The Life of Ian Fleming

Supremely enjoyable... Matthew Parker has created a completely new picture of Ian, Bond and the role of Jamaica in the making of the legend

John Pearson, author of THE LIFE OF IAN FLEMING

The book that James Bond obsessives have been waiting for – a beautiful, brilliant history of Ian Fleming at home at Goldeneye, all of sun-drenched, gin-soaked, bed-hopping colonial Jamaica outside the window and 007 at the moment of his creation. This is the big bang of Bond books.

[Here are] the glowing sea, the teeming life beneath the waves, and the warm black nights, all of which made their way into the Bond novels... [But] Parker’s highly readable account of Fleming’s Jamaican life is less Thunderball and more Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Bond himself might have been a touch jealous.

A superb account of Fleming’s Jamaica… well-researched, excellently written… Without Jamaica, it is safe to say, there would have been no Agent 007.

Matthew Parker's brilliant book Goldeneye is indispensable for anyone interested in the inner life of the enigmatic Ian Fleming and the whole James Bond phenomenon he created.

As illuminating as it is intriguing... Written in a quick-fire, atmospheric, prose style that clearly owes something to Fleming’s own, it cracks along with all the urgency of a Bond novel.

Best read sitting somewhere hot, sipping something cool is Matthew Parker’s brilliant addition to the cannon of Jamaican travel writing and 007-ology

[this] account of the role Goldeneye played in the evolution of 007 is persuasive, well researched and entertaining

Jamaica offers the key to a fresh understanding of Fleming and our own relationship with Bond . . . an enjoyable, sun-soaked, alcohol-sodden addition to Bond literature.

Parker's record of a key period in the life of the writer makes a fascinating read

Entertaining . . . Parker makes a convincing case that Jamaica is crucial to a proper understanding of the man and his work.

Completely fascinating, authoritative and intriguing

Sexy, funny and finally tragic, it’s the perfect holiday read

Parker wonderfully captures the end-of-empire atmosphere that inspired the cold war’s most famous fictional hero

Matthew Parker’s latest book, Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica, is a fascinating insight into the man, the author and Jamaica, the major inspiration for 007…Parker takes his readers to a faraway location, both in distance and time, which will always be beyond the reach of most. Fleming’s Jamaica remains something only found in books, and Parker gives a nostalgic glimpse into the author’s affluent and inspirational world.

Born in Central America in 1970, MATTHEW PARKER spent part of his childhood in the West Indies. He has written for most UK national newspapers as well as History Today, BBC History Magazine and the Literary Review and has also lectured around the world and contributed to TV and radio programmes in the UK and US. His bestselling and critically-acclaimed books include Monte Cassino, Panama Fever and The Sugar Barons.

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Completely fascinating, authoritative and intriguing' William Boyd 
 
'The big bang of Bond books... Beautiful, brilliant' Tony Parsons 
_______________________________________________________________________ 
 
Goldeneye: the story of Ian Fleming in Jamaica and the creation of British national icon, James Bond. 
 
From 1946 until the end of his life, Ian Fleming lived for two months of every year at Goldeneye - the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. 
 
Fleming adored the Jamaica he had discovered, at the time an imperial backwater that seemed unchanged from the glory days of the empire. Amid its stunning natural beauty, the austerity and decline of post-war Britain could be forgotten. For Fleming, Jamaica offered the perfect mixture of British old-fashioned conservatism and imperial values, alongside the dangerous and sensual: the same curious combination that made his novels so appealing, and successful. The spirit of the island - its exotic beauty, its unpredictability, its melancholy, its love of exaggeration and gothic melodrama - infuses his writing. 
 
Fleming threw himself into the island's hedonistic Jet Set party scene: Hollywood giants, and the cream of British aristocracy, the theatre, literary society and the secret services spent their time here drinking and bed-hopping. But while the whites partied, Jamaican blacks were rising up to demand respect and self-government. And as the imperial hero James Bond - projecting British power across the world - became ever more anachronistic and fantastical, so his popularity soared. 
 
Drawing on extensive interviews with Ian's family, his Jamaican lover Blanche Blackwell and many other islanders, Goldeneye is a beautifully written, revealing and original exploration of a crucially important part of Ian Fleming's life and work.

The Sugar Barons

Power, money and corruption in the British Empire: the English families for whom the sugar trade brought wealth beyond their wildest dreams

Compelling, wonderful . . . The Sugar Barons is an exemplary book; history as it should be written

Gripping . . . a compendium of greed, horrible ingenuity and wickedness, but also a fascinating and thoughtful social history

A shocking tale of corruption and brutality ... an admirable and gripping history

Very impressive - a meticulously researched piece of work, and so engagingly written ... what a story!

Andrea Levy, author of Small Island and Long Song

A tumultuous rollercoaster of a book ... Mr Parker tells an extraordinary, neglected and shameful history with gusto

Parker's descriptions of West Indian life are not only beautifully crafted but full of surprises. What's more, his accounts of tropical combat are utterly compelling. As a portrait of the heat, horror and vanity of that time, The Sugar Barons is surely without equal

Parker's epic story, from the 19th century to the present day, is awesome

An epic tale of human folly and endeavour, beautifully told and researched

Alternately excoriating and scintillating, Parker's account blends an analysis of how slavery deformed Britain's early empire with narratives worthy of Conrad. It is a tale peopled by terrifying grotesques: captains of industry whose initiative, swagger and fortitude were more than matched by the monstrous scale of their crimes.

Fabulously researched, the diary entries, letters and papers reveal a staggering level of corruption and cruelty . . . He constructs, piece by piece, what amounts to a compelling prosecution of the slavery and Imperial greed that left a shocking legacy in the region

Racy, well-researched history . . . The Sugar Barons provides eloquent testimony to the mercantile greed of a few and manifest misery endured by millions in the pursuit of sweetness

Required reading for anyone interested in history ... timely and thrillingly told

Born in Central America, Matthew Parker spent part of his childhood in the West Indies, acquiring a life-long fascination with the history of the region. Since graduating from Oxford, he has worked as an editorial consultant on a number of works of history, and written three bestselling books. He now lives with his family in east London.

For 200 years after 1650 the West Indies were the most fought-over colonies in the world, as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar - a commodity so lucrative that it was known as white gold. 
 
Young men, beset by death and disease, an ocean away from the moral anchors of life in Britain, created immense dynastic wealth but produced a society poisoned by war, sickness, cruelty and corruption. 
 
The Sugar Barons explores the lives and experiences of those whose fortunes rose and fell with the West Indian empire. From the ambitious and brilliant entrepreneurs, to the grandees wielding power across the Atlantic, to the inheritors often consumed by decadence, disgrace and madness, this is the compelling story of how a few small islands and a handful of families decisively shaped the British Empire.

The Battle to Build the Panama Canal

Hell's Gorge

The brilliantly ambitious, epic story of a thirty-year battle against the elements, disease, impossible terrain and massive financial collapse to create one of the most extraordinary engineering feats in world history.

As heard on the Empire podcast, the epic story of one of the most extraordinary engineering feats in world history: the building of the Panama Canal. 
 
'A completely wonderful book, beautifully written, amazingly researched' William Dalrymple 
 
'An excellent, excellent book’ Anita Anand 
 
Hell's Gorge traces a heroic dream that spanned four centuries: to build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans The human cost was immense: in appalling working conditions and amid epidemics of fever, tens of thousands perished fighting the jungle, swamps and mountains of Panama, a scale of attrition comparable to many great battles. 
 
Matthew Parker explores the fierce geo-political struggle behind the heroic vision of the canal, and the immense engineering and medical battles that were fought. But he also weaves in the stories of the ordinary men and women who worked on the canal, to evoke everyday life on the construction and depict the battle on the ground deep in 'Hell's Gorge'. Using diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers and previously unseen private letters, he draws a vivid picture of the heart-breaking struggle on the Isthmus, in particular that of the British West Indians who made up the majority of the canal workforce. 
 
Hell's Gorge is a tale of politics, finance, press manipulation, scandal and intrigue, populated by a dazzling cast of idealists and bullies, heroes and conmen. But it is also a moving tribute to the 'Forgotten Silvermen', so many of whom died to fulfil the centuries-old canal dream.

Matthew Parker has picked a fascinating subject and written a book worthy of it ... It is peopled with a host of characters, some heroic, others corrupt, almost all out of the ordinary. There isn't a dull page

Parker's epic story, from the 18th century to the present day, is awesome

A completely wonderful book, beautifully written, amazingly researched

An excellent, excellent book

Parker has written the Panama story for a new generation. He quotes extensively from letters and diaries of ordinary workers writing home to their families. And it is their heartfelt views on the conditions in which they lived and worked that really bring this book to life

Parker's great forte in Panama Fever is to bring this complex story to life through a succession of vivid characters

Parker guides readers through the complicated story with a sure sense of both the larger narrative and the telling detail

Excellent... the story is an epic one, and Parker has brilliantly done justice to every aspect of a complex episode

The essence of Parker's rather remarkable achievement in this altogether entertaining history is to show just how much more than an engineering triumph the construction of the canal really was... This is exemplary history, vigorously told with a respect for complexity that enriches rather than obscures the pleasure of a great story

The extraordinary story of western man's compulsion to wrestle with nature in the central American swamps and rainforests

Matthew Parker intertwines the various strands of the story - personal and national, political and financial, geographical and technological - with finesse ... Best of all, his prose somehow manages to infect the reader with the Panama fever itself. It is no mean achievement

Today other armies of impoverished workmen build Dubai, Shanghai or the Three Gorges Dam with barely a murmur of the real price paid by them and by nature. It is a shame. We need writers capable of depicting these epic projects with the same skill Parker brings to portraying the 19th century's great engineering dream

Matthew Parker is a critically acclaimed historian who has written for numerous UK national newspapers, literary and historical magazines, as well as lecturing around the world and contributing to TV and radio programmes in the UK, Canada and the US. An elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Parker's books include The Battle of Britain, Monte Cassino, Panama Fever, The Sugar Barons and Goldeneye: Ian Fleming in Jamaica. Parker lives in east London with his family.

Matthew Parker

Parker has trawled the letters and literature, and travelled out to Suriname, and the result is a miniature masterpiece….this is a truly extraordinary tale and, in Parker’s hands, it’s beautifully told. With great wit and scholarship he reveals — just for a moment — a cruel and curious world, before it vanishes again beneath the trees.

An excellent account…Willoughbyland is popular history at its best.

A fascinating tale of courage and desperation, cruelty and betrayal, and it was all sparked by the search for the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

The author has written several other highly enjoyable histories of the Caribbean, and he is on fine and colourful form here.

A fascinating tale…Matthew Parker is an entertaining historian who has produced a lively account.

[T]he long-obscure but intriguing Willoughbyland can now console itself that it has, in this frequently fascinating book, a history it deserves.

An odd, bygone moment in England's political dreaming, rendered expertly.

[A]n enjoyable account of a neglected moment in the emergence of the British empire.

‘An excellent book throwing light on a fascinating period in history... An enjoyable read… Impeccably well-researched.’

England's Lost Colony

At the beginning of the 1650s, England was in ruins – wrecked, impoverished, grief-stricken by plague and civil war. Yet shimmering on the horizon was an intoxicating possibility, a vision of paradise: Willoughbyland. 
 
Ambitious and free-thinking adventurers poured in, attracted by the toleration, the optimism, the rich soil and the promise of the gold of El Dorado. It was England's most hopeful colony. 
 
But the Restoration saw the end of political freedom, and brought in its place spies, war, rebellion and treachery. The advent of racial slavery poisoned everything. What started out as a heaven was soon to become one of the cruellest places on earth. 
 
The history of Willoughbyland is a microcosm of empire, its heady attractions and fatal dangers.

Matthew Parker

Praise for Willoughbyland

Parker has trawled the letters and literature, and travelled out to Suriname, and the result is a miniature masterpiece….this is a truly extraordinary tale and, in Parker’s hands, it’s beautifully told. With great w ...

An excellent account…Willoughbyland is popular history at its best.

A fascinating tale of courage and desperation, cruelty and betrayal, and it was all sparked by the search for the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

Parker has trawled the letters and literature, and travelled out to Suriname, and the result is a miniature masterpiece….this is a truly extraordinary tale and, in Parker’s hands, it’s beautifully told. With great w ...

An excellent account…Willoughbyland is popular history at its best.

A fascinating tale of courage and desperation, cruelty and betrayal, and it was all sparked by the search for the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

Parker has trawled the letters and literature, and travelled out to Suriname, and the result is a miniature masterpiece….this is a truly extraordinary tale and, in Parker’s hands, it’s beautifully told. With great w ...

An excellent account…Willoughbyland is popular history at its best.

A fascinating tale of courage and desperation, cruelty and betrayal, and it was all sparked by the search for the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

Books by Matthew Parker

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