T he funniest, and by some way most characteristic, story about Peter Fleming (1907–71) has our man turning up at the Garrick Club in central London sometime in the 1950s clad in full evening dress: ...

As Britain waited for a Nazi invasion in the summer of 1940, a select group of men prepared to meet the enemy with lethal eccentricity. His name was Peter Fleming, brother of Bond writer Ian Fleming.

Peter Jemmett, a member of Fleming’s unit, said later that, when Fleming’s first Bond novels appeared in the 1950s, colleagues immediately recognized Dalzel-Job in the 007 character.

I recently came across British author Peter Fleming in a biography of his brother, Ian Fleming, the James Bond author. Until the 1950s, when Ian began writing Bond books, he was always known as ...