Lil

Regular readers of my blog may well know by now that I am a huge fan of James Bond . I have been waiting for this film for so long. As soon as the credits rolled on  Skyfall I was already longing for my next Bond fix. The past three years I've followed every rumour and development with bated breath. It's only natural then that I saw SPECTRE on it's opening night. I was buzzing about it beforehand and haven't stopped talking about it since! **I try to keep all of my reviews spoiler free, but of course if you don't want to know anything at all about the film, it's perhaps best you stop reading here!** Fair play to the lad who turned up in a tuxedo to watch it! It was either his own choice, a dare, or he had a fancy dinner party beforehand, but either way it made my evening before the film had even started! Sam Smith's theme song, Writing's on the Wall, which I wasn't all that keen on on first listen, has really grown on me, and it fitted the openi...

With the much anticipated film release of S PECTRE just around the corner, tonight in fact, this lifelong James Bond fan is in her element. However, I have to admit that I have actually read very few of the original books - Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd have both written credible additions to the Bond canon,  Devil May Care  and  Solo  respectively, and those I have read - but  The Spy Who Loved Me was, until recently, the only one of Fleming's books that I remember reading! Around this time last year I was lucky enough to grab the boxed set of Fleming Bonds for £10 (yes, a tenner for the whole set, thanks The Book People !), but for some inexplicable reason they remained untouched, until now. Again, it was around this time last year that I found out one of my all time favourite writers, Anthony Horowitz, had been commissioned to write the next James Bond book. For those unfamiliar with him -although regular readers of my blog will have seen many a post ta...

This book has been on my to-read list for some time, so when I came across it in Poundland - I kid you not, they sell books there now too - I couldn't wait to get stuck in. Lysander Rief, an actor, is visiting Vienna for psychological help with a problem of a personal nature. What else happens to him during his stay there no one could ever have predicted, and sets off a chain of events that are to change his life forever. Next thing he knows, " Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous world of wartime intelligence- a world of sex, scandal and spies that is slowly, steadily, permeating every corner of his life " (blurb). The reluctant spy is a theme often covered in fiction, but the scene is set so well that you can't help but want Lysander to succeed. He may well be untrained, but Lysander's theatrical background comes in useful, and I liked his use of disguises. I also liked the effective use of diary sections to give an insight into Lysander's thoug...

It is no secret that I am a huge Bond-geek, so it was a given that I pounced on this book the moment that I saw it on the library shelf. Admittedly, despite my love for all things Bond, it has been a while since I've read any Ian Fleming to compare Boyd's style to (the last Bond book I read was Sebastian Faulk's Devil May Care and I can't remember much about that either). Blurb: "A seasoned veteran of the service, 007 is sent to single-handedly stop a civil war in the small West African nation of Zanzarim. Aided by a beautiful accomplice and hindered by the local militia, he undergoes a scarring experience which compels him to ignore M's orders in pursuit of his own brand of justice."  The storyline is about as far from the glamourous world of casino's and villains that we have come to associate with the British icon as you can get, and war stories really aren't my kind of thing. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a go, for Bond's sake. In his ...