It is now 40 years since the premiere of the very first Bond movie, Dr No, with a youthful Sean Connery as 007: perhaps the most charismatic - and certainly the most durable - movie hero ever. The latest addition to the series will no doubt try and outdo all its predecessors in the scale of its pyrotechnics and special effects. But James Bond was invented by one man, Ian Fleming, a wartime intelligence officer and Sunday Times newspaper man who lived to see the beginning of the Bond cult, but not its astonishing growth into a multi-million-dollar industry. John Pearson knew him well, as his assistant at the Sunday Times when Fleming was writing its Atticus column, and in 1966, after Fleming's death, wrote this autobiography. It remains a definitive account of how only Ian Fleming could have dreamed up James Bond, for his own life as colourful as anything in his fiction - indeed, it shows how the Bond books were nothing less than a covert autobiography. Glamorous, ruthlessly womanising, charming and debonair, leading an exotic, globetrotting life from wartime Algiers to his beachside house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica, Fleming was nevertheless as elusive and opaque as his fictional hero - a man whose icy reserve few could breach. For this edition of the autobiography, John Pearson has added a new introduction, in which he looks at the extent to which the character of Fleming survives even immortality beyond its creator's wildest dreams.