Henry Chancellor > Quotes

“A little reckless bravery may end up saving your life.”
― Henry Chancellor, The Forgotten Echo

“Sir Henry fixed him with a keen eye.
'Odd name, Tom Skatt - eh?'
'Thats right'
'You don't think we could be related?'
Tom looked up at his great-great-great-uncle and smiled.
'I don't think so'
'No,' grinned Sir Henry "no, of course not”
― Henry Chancellor, The Museum's Secret

“To Fleming, and to his readers, James Bond was a real person living in the modern world. The details of his life appear only sporadically in the books, but they proved vitally important in grounding him in his time, which made his extraordinary and often implausible adventures seem possible.”
― Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, the Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation

“... James Bond had very little to do with the navy at all: it was a convenient front. Bond was secret service from the start ....”
― Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, the Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation

“... so much of James Bond was Ian Fleming himself. Ian was never able to write about anything he did not know, or any place he had not been. James Bond had been around for a long time -- as long, in fact, as Ian Fleming had been dreaming himself into fantasy situations. When he finally emerged on paper, 007 was a toughened-up younger-brother version of Ian himself: more straightforward, less interesting, the kind of young hothead Ian might have been had he not valued power above adventure.”
― Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, the Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation

“Ian Fleming may have been very practical about writing James Bond, but at heart he was a romantic. He ... was tapping directly into a deep wellspring of his own imagination, which he laced with the usual blend of sex, travel, culinary detail and fine living that encapsulated the aspirations of the age, and was absolutely an expression of Fleming himself. He may have dismissed his creation as idle fantasy, but he was entirely serious about the world he had created .... Ian Fleming could not put any clear water between himself and his fiction because he was living his work as he wrote it .... To discover the origins of James Bond one has to begin by exploring the deep streams that fed the well of Fleming's imagination, and his own complicated personality.”
― Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, the Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation