United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Thunderball (film)
Thunderball is a 1965 British spy film and the fourth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, starring Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ian Fleming, which in turn was based on an original screenplay by Jack Whittingham, it was directed by Terence Young, with its screenplay by John Hopkins. The movie would have been the first of the Bond series if not for legal disputes over copyright issues; the film follows Bond's mission to find two NATO atomic bombs stolen by SPECTRE, which holds the world to ransom for £100 million in diamonds, in exchange for not destroying an unspecified major city in either the United Kingdom or the United States. The search leads Bond to the Bahamas, where he encounters Emilio Largo, the card-playing, eye patch-wearing SPECTRE Number Two. Backed by CIA agent Felix Leiter and Largo's mistress, Domino Derval, Bond's search culminates in an underwater battle with Largo's henchmen; the film had a complex production, with four different units and about a quarter of the film consisting of underwater scenes.
Thunderball was the first Bond film shot in widescreen Panavision and the first to have running time of over two hours. Thunderball was associated with a legal dispute in 1961 when former Ian Fleming collaborators Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham sued him shortly after the 1961 publication of the novel, claiming he based it upon the screenplay the trio had written in a failed cinematic translation of James Bond; the lawsuit was settled out of court and Bond film series producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, fearing a rival McClory film, allowed him to retain certain screen rights to the novel's story and characters, for McClory to receive sole producer credit on this film; the film was a success, earning a total of $141.2 million worldwide, exceeding the earnings of the three previous Bond films. In 1966, John Stears won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and production designer Ken Adam was nominated for a BAFTA award. Thunderball is the most financially successful film of the series in North America when adjusting for ticket price inflation.
Some critics and viewers showered praise on the film and branded it a welcome addition to the series, while others complained of the repetitively monotonous aquatic action and prolonged length. In 1983, Warner Bros. released a second film adaptation of the novel under the title Never Say Never Again, with McClory as executive producer. James Bond attends the funeral of Colonel Jacques Bouvar, a SPECTRE operative connected with the previous murders of two MI6 agents. Bouvar is alive and disguised as his own widow. Pursuing Bouvar to his château, Bond fights and kills him, escaping with use of a jetpack and his Aston Martin DB5, conveniently driven up by French agent, Madame La Porte. At a SPECTRE meeting in Paris, chaired by the enigmatic Number One, Emilio Largo introduces the group's latest project: hijacking two atomic bombs and holding NATO for ransom; the plot begins at Shrublands sanatorium, located close to a NATO air base. Coincidentally, James Bond is at Shrublands to improve his health.
There, he notices. Bond searches Lippe's room, is seen leaving by the man in the adjoining room, whose head is covered in bandages. Lippe tries to murder Bond with a spinal traction machine, but Bond is saved by his physiotherapist, Patricia Fearing. Lippe and Angelo Palazzi, the bandaged man, are part of SPECTRE's plot. Angelo's face has been surgically altered to match French Air Force pilot François Derval, staying at Shrublands. Derval is slated to fly on a training mission aboard an RAF Avro Vulcan strategic jet bomber loaded with two atomic bombs. Angelo kills Derval, collects $100,000 from SPECTRE Agent Fiona Volpe demands an extra $150,000 for the job. Fiona acquiesces; the next morning, Angelo takes Derval's place on the flight. Angelo gasses the rest of the crew flies the Vulcan to the Bahamas, landing it in shallow water near Largo's ship, the Disco Volante. SPECTRE SCUBA divers, commanded by Largo, retrieve the atomic bombs. Angelo, trapped by his seat strapping, is left to drown by Largo for reneging on his original deal with SPECTRE.
Meanwhile, Bond has uncovered Derval's corpse at the clinic. On the motorway to London, Lippe attacks Bond, but a masked motorcyclist kills Lippe with a rocket-propelled grenade and zooms off; the rider abandons the motorcycle and unmasks: it is Fiona, acting on Ernst Stavro Blofeld's orders to eliminate Lippe for hiring the greedy Angelo. At an MI6 conference in London, all of the 00 agents are informed that SPECTRE demands £100 million from NATO in exchange for returning the bombs, threatens to destroy a major city in the United States or the United Kingdom if the ransom is not paid within seven days. Bond recognizes the briefing photograph of Derval as the corpse at Shrublands, he asks M to send him to Bahamas, to contact Derval's sister, Domino. While snorkelling, Bond meets Domino. At a casino, he encounters Largo and Domino, his mistress. Bond enters a game against Largo and wins, subsequently takes Domino to a dance. Bond and Largo recognise each other as adversaries and begin a tense cat-and-mouse game while still pretending ignorance of each other's true nature.
Bond meets Felix Leiter and Q, is issued various gadgets, including an underwater infrared camera, a distress beacon, underwater breathing apparatus, a flare gun, a Geiger counter. Diving under the Disco Volante, Bond fails to find the atomic bombs, but detects an underwater hatch.
Rome
Rome is the capital city and a special comune of Italy. Rome serves as the capital of the Lazio region. With 2,872,800 residents in 1,285 km2, it is the country's most populated comune, it is the fourth most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. It is the centre of the Metropolitan City of Rome, which has a population of 4,355,725 residents, thus making it the most populous metropolitan city in Italy. Rome is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio, along the shores of the Tiber; the Vatican City is an independent country inside the city boundaries of Rome, the only existing example of a country within a city: for this reason Rome has been defined as capital of two states. Rome's history spans 28 centuries. While Roman mythology dates the founding of Rome at around 753 BC, the site has been inhabited for much longer, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Europe; the city's early population originated from a mix of Latins and Sabines.
The city successively became the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, is regarded by some as the first metropolis. It was first called The Eternal City by the Roman poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC, the expression was taken up by Ovid and Livy. Rome is called the "Caput Mundi". After the fall of the Western Empire, which marked the beginning of the Middle Ages, Rome fell under the political control of the Papacy, in the 8th century it became the capital of the Papal States, which lasted until 1870. Beginning with the Renaissance all the popes since Nicholas V pursued over four hundred years a coherent architectural and urban programme aimed at making the city the artistic and cultural centre of the world. In this way, Rome became first one of the major centres of the Italian Renaissance, the birthplace of both the Baroque style and Neoclassicism. Famous artists, painters and architects made Rome the centre of their activity, creating masterpieces throughout the city.
In 1871, Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, which, in 1946, became the Italian Republic. Rome has the status of a global city. In 2016, Rome ranked as the 14th-most-visited city in the world, 3rd most visited in the European Union, the most popular tourist attraction in Italy, its historic centre is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The famous Vatican Museums are among the world's most visited museums while the Colosseum was the most popular tourist attraction in world with 7.4 million visitors in 2018. Host city for the 1960 Summer Olympics, Rome is the seat of several specialized agencies of the United Nations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development; the city hosts the Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean as well as the headquarters of many international business companies such as Eni, Enel, TIM, Leonardo S.p. A. and national and international banks such as Unicredit and BNL.
Its business district, called EUR, is the base of many companies involved in the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry, financial services. Rome is an important fashion and design centre thanks to renowned international brands centered in the city. Rome's Cinecittà Studios have been the set of many Academy Award–winning movies. According to the founding myth of the city by the Ancient Romans themselves, the long-held tradition of the origin of the name Roma is believed to have come from the city's founder and first king, Romulus. However, it is a possibility that the name Romulus was derived from Rome itself; as early as the 4th century, there have been alternative theories proposed on the origin of the name Roma. Several hypotheses have been advanced focusing on its linguistic roots which however remain uncertain: from Rumon or Rumen, archaic name of the Tiber, which in turn has the same root as the Greek verb ῥέω and the Latin verb ruo, which both mean "flow". There is archaeological evidence of human occupation of the Rome area from 14,000 years ago, but the dense layer of much younger debris obscures Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites.
Evidence of stone tools and stone weapons attest to about 10,000 years of human presence. Several excavations support the view that Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill built above the area of the future Roman Forum. Between the end of the bronze age and the beginning of the Iron age, each hill between the sea and the Capitol was topped by a village. However, none of them had yet an urban quality. Nowadays, there is a wide consensus that the city developed through the aggregation of several villages around the largest one, placed above the Palatine; this aggregation was facilitated by the increase of agricultural productivity above the subsistence level, which allowed the establishment of secondary and tertiary activities. These in turn boosted the development of trade with the Greek colonies of southern Italy; these developments, which according to archaeological ev
Pound sterling
The pound sterling known as the pound and less referred to as sterling, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, the British Antarctic Territory, Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence. A number of nations that do not use sterling have currencies called the pound. Sterling is the third most-traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar, the euro. Together with those two currencies and the Chinese yuan, it forms the basket of currencies which calculate the value of IMF special drawing rights. Sterling is the third most-held reserve currency in global reserves; the British Crown dependencies of Guernsey and the Isle of Man produce their own local issues of sterling which are considered equivalent to UK sterling in their respective regions. The pound sterling is used in Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, Saint Helena and Ascension Island in Saint Helena and Tristan da Cunha; the Bank of England is the central bank for the pound sterling, issuing its own coins and banknotes, regulating issuance of banknotes by private banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Banknotes issued by other jurisdictions are not regulated by the Bank of England. The full official name pound sterling, is used in formal contexts and when it is necessary to distinguish the United Kingdom currency from other currencies with the same name. Otherwise the term pound is used; the currency name is sometimes abbreviated to just sterling in the wholesale financial markets, but not when referring to specific amounts. The abbreviations "ster." and "stg." are sometimes used. The term "British pound" is sometimes incorrectly used in less formal contexts, it is not an official name of the currency; the exchange rate of the pound sterling against the US dollar is referred to as "cable" in the wholesale foreign exchange markets. The origins of this term are attributed to the fact that in the 1800s, the GBP/USD exchange rate was transmitted via transatlantic cable. Forex traders of GBP/USD are sometimes referred to as "cable dealers". GBP/USD is now the only currency pair with its own name in the foreign exchange markets, after IEP/USD, known as "wire" in the forward FX markets, no longer exists after the Irish Pound was replaced by the euro in 1999.
There is apparent convergence of opinion regarding the origin of the term "pound sterling", toward its derivation from the name of a small Norman silver coin, away from its association with Easterlings or other etymologies. Hence, the Oxford English Dictionary state that the "most plausible" etymology is derivation from the Old English steorra for "star" with the added diminutive suffix "-ling", to mean "little star" and to refer to a silver penny of the English Normans; as another established source notes, the compound expression was derived: However, the perceived narrow window of the issuance of this coin, the fact that coin designs changed in the period in question, led Philip Grierson to reject this in favour of a more complex theory. Another argument that the Hanseatic League was the origin for both the origin of its definition and manufacture, in its name is that the German name for the Baltic is "Ost See", or "East Sea", from this the Baltic merchants were called "Osterlings", or "Easterlings".
In 1260, Henry III granted them a charter of protection and land for their Kontor, the Steelyard of London, which by the 1340s was called "Easterlings Hall", or Esterlingeshalle. Because the League's money was not debased like that of England, English traders stipulated to be paid in pounds of the "Easterlings", contracted to "'sterling". For further discussion of the etymology of "sterling", see sterling silver; the currency sign for the pound is £, written with a single cross-bar, though a version with a double cross-bar is sometimes seen. This symbol derives from medieval Latin documents; the ISO 4217 currency code is GBP, formed from "GB", the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for the United Kingdom, the first letter of "pound". It does not stand for "Great Britain Pound" or "Great British Pound"; the abbreviation "UKP" is used but this is non-standard because the ISO 3166 country code for the United Kingdom is GB. The Crown dependencies use their own codes: GGP, JEP and IMP. Stocks are traded in pence, so traders may refer to pence sterling, GBX, when listing stock prices.
A common slang term for the pound sterling or pound is quid, singular and plural, except in the common phrase "quids in!". The term may have come via Italian immigrants from "scudo", the name for a number of coins used in Italy until the 19th century.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher and university professor. He is known for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, literary theory, he wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault and L'isola del giorno prima. His novel Il cimitero di Praga, released in 2010, topped the bestseller charts in Italy. Eco wrote academic texts, children's books, essays, he was the founder of the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Republic of San Marino, president of the Graduate School for the Study of the Humanities at the University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei, an honorary fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. Eco was honoured with the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2005 along with Roger Angell. Eco was born in the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont in northern Italy, here he attended high school, his father, one of thirteen children, was an accountant before the government called him to serve in three wars.
During World War II, Umberto and his mother, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education and made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews, his family name is an acronym of ex caelis oblatus, given to his grandfather by a city official. Umberto's father urged him to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin to take up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning a Laurea degree in philosophy in 1954. During his university studies, Eco left the Catholic Church. After that, Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana and lectured at the University of Turin. A group of avant-garde artists, painters and writers, whom he had befriended at RAI, became an important and influential component in Eco's writing career; this was true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, an extension of his Laurea thesis.
This marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater. In September 1962 he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he had a son and a daughter, he divided his time between a vacation house near Urbino. He had a 20,000 volume library in the latter, he was a visiting professor at Columbia University several times in the 1990s. In 1992–1993 Eco was the Norton professor at Harvard University. On 8 May 1993, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Indiana University Bloomington in recognition of his over fifteen-year association with the university's Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Six books that were authored, co-authored, or co-edited by Eco were published by Indiana University Press. In 1996, he was appointed Honorary Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Tartu, he collaborated with his friend Thomas Sebeok and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University. He became Satrap of the Collège de'Pataphysique in 2001. On 23 May 2002, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
In 2009, the University of Belgrade in Serbia awarded him an honorary doctorate. Eco was a member of the Italian skeptic organization Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze CICAP. Eco died at his Milanese home of pancreatic cancer, from which he had been suffering for two years, on the night of 19 February 2016. At the time of his death at the age of 84, he was a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, a position that he had held since 2008. In 1959 Eco published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale, on medieval philosophy. After 18 months' military service in the Italian Army, he left RAI in 1959 to become the senior non-fiction editor of the Bompiani publishing house in Milan, a position he occupied until 1975. Eco began developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, in 1962 he published Opera aperta. In it, Eco argued. Literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind and life are the liveliest and best—although valuation terminology was not his primary focus.
Eco came to these positions through study of language and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis. Eco's short 1961 essay "Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno" received much notoriety among the general public and has drawn endless questions by journalists at every public appearance by Eco, his book Apocalittici e integrati analyzes the phenomenon of mass communication from a sociolo
Fence (criminal)
A fence known as a receiver, mover, or moving man, is an individual who knowingly buys stolen goods in order to resell them for profit. The fence acts as a middleman between thieves and the eventual buyers of stolen goods who may not be aware that the goods are stolen; as a verb, the word describes the behaviour of the thief in the transaction: The burglar fenced the stolen radio. This sense of the term came from thieves' slang, first attested c. 1700, from the notion of such transactions providing a defence against being caught. The term remains in common use in all major dialects of modern English, all of which spell it with a "c" though the source word in some dialects is now spelled defense; the fence is able to make a profit with stolen merchandise because he/she is able to secretly pay thieves a low price for "hot" goods that cannot be sold on the open markets. The thieves who patronize the fence are willing to accept a low profit margin in order to reduce their risks by "washing their hands" of the black market loot and disassociating themselves from the criminal act that procured it.
After the sale, the fence recoups their investment by disguising the stolen nature of the goods and reselling the goods as near to the white market price as possible without drawing suspicion. This process relies on a legal business in order to "launder" the stolen goods by intermixing them with legally-purchased items of the same type. Fencing is illegal in all countries, but proving a violation of anti-fencing laws can be difficult; the fence is able to make a profit with stolen merchandise because he is able to pay thieves a low price for stolen goods. Thieves agree to this because their alternatives may present a greater risk of the thief being caught; as well, selling stolen goods takes a great deal of time and effort, as the thief would have to try to contact a number of potential buyers and show them the merchandise. Some habitual thieves are so well known to police that if the thief were to attempt to sell any used goods, this would draw the attention of law enforcement; the fence disguises the stolen nature of the goods, if possible, so that he or she can sell them closer to the market price.
Depending on the stolen item, the fence may attempt to remove, deface, or replace serial numbers on the stolen item before reselling it. In some cases, fences will transport the stolen items to a different city to sell them, because this lessens the likelihood that the items will be recognized. For some types of stolen goods, fences disassemble the good and sell the individual parts, because the sale of parts is less risky. For example, a stolen car or bicycle may be disassembled. Another tactic used by some fences is to retain stolen items for some time before selling them, which lessens the likelihood that the burglary victims or police will be looking for the items in auctions and pawnshops. Fencing is conducted through legal businesses; some fences maintain a legitimate-seeming "front". Depending on the type of stolen merchandise a fence deals in, "front" businesses might be discount stores, used goods stores, a coin and gem store, auction house, flea market, or auto salvage yards; the degree of illicit activity in each "front" business may differ from fence to fence.
While one fence's salvage yard may consist of stolen auto parts, another fence's used goods store might consist of legitimately purchased used goods, with the stolen merchandise acting as a minor, but profitable, sideline. The prices fences pay thieves depend both on norms and on legitimate market rates for the items in question. Vulnerable sellers, such as drug addicts or casual thieves, may receive less than 20% of an item's value. Higher prices, sometimes as high as 50% of an item's value in a legal market, can be commanded by a professional thief one who concentrates on valuable items. At the same time, fences will take advantage of thieves by deceiving them about the value of an individual item and the relevant market conditions. For example, a fence may falsely tell a petty thief that the market for the type of good which the thief is selling is flooded with this type of merchandise, to justify paying out a lower price. Research on fences shows that they view themselves as entrepreneurs, relying on networking with and patronage by prominent criminals to become successful in their word-of-mouth-based "wheeling and dealing".
They occupy the middle ground between the legitimate world. Some active fences go farther in their business, maintaining longstanding contacts and teaching thieves how to practice their craft, whether by identifying specific products or by teaching them tools of the trade. There are a number of different types of fences. One way of categorizing fences is by the type of good in which they trade, such as jewels, power tools, or electronics. Another way of categorizing fences is by their level of involvement in buying and selling stolen goods. At the lowest level, a hustler or drug dealer may accept stolen goods. At the highest level would be a fence whose main criminal income comes from buying and selling stolen items. At the broadest level, two tiers of fences can be distinguished; the lower level of fences are those who directly buy stolen goods from burglars. At a higher level are the "m
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author and naval intelligence officer, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. and his father was the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton and the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing. While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, Fleming was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force, his wartime service and his career as a journalist provided much of the background and depth of the James Bond novels. Fleming wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, it was a success, with three print runs being commissioned to cope with the demand. Eleven Bond novels and two collections of short stories followed between 1953 and 1966.
The novels revolved around James Bond, an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service known as MI6. Bond was known by his code number, 007, was a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve; the Bond stories rank among the best-selling series of fictional books of all time, having sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Fleming wrote the children's story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and two works of non-fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked Fleming 14th on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Fleming was married to Ann Charteris, divorced from the second Viscount Rothermere because of her affair with the author. Fleming and Charteris had Caspar. Fleming was a heavy smoker and drinker for most of his life and succumbed to heart disease in 1964 at the age of 56. Two of his James Bond books were published posthumously. Fleming's creation has appeared in film twenty-six times, portrayed by seven actors. Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair.
His mother was Evelyn, his father was Valentine Fleming, the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 to 1917. As an infant he lived, with his family, at Braziers Park in Oxfordshire. Fleming was a grandson of the Scottish financier Robert Fleming, who founded the Scottish American Investment Trust and the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. In 1914, with the start of the First World War, Valentine Fleming joined "C" Squadron, Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars, rose to the rank of major, he was killed by German shelling on the Western Front on 20 May 1917. Because the family owned an estate at Arnisdale, Valentine's death was commemorated on the Glenelg War Memorial. Fleming's elder brother Peter became married actress Celia Johnson. Peter served with the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, was commissioned under Colin Gubbins to help establish the Auxiliary Units, became involved in behind-the-lines operations in Norway and Greece during the war. Fleming had two younger brothers and Richard, a younger maternal half-sister born out of wedlock, the cellist Amaryllis Fleming, whose father was the artist Augustus John.
Amaryllis was conceived during a long-term affair between John and Evelyn that started in 1923, six years after the death of Valentine. In 1914 Fleming attended a preparatory school on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, he did not enjoy his time at Durnford. In 1921 Fleming enrolled at Eton College. Not a high achiever academically, he excelled at athletics and held the title of Victor Ludorum for two years between 1925 and 1927, he edited a school magazine, The Wyvern. His lifestyle at Eton brought him into conflict with his housemaster, E. V. Slater, who disapproved of Fleming's attitude, his hair oil, his ownership of a car and his relations with women. Slater persuaded Fleming's mother to remove him from Eton a term early for a crammer course to gain entry to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he spent less than a year there, leaving in 1927 without gaining a commission, after contracting gonorrhea. In 1927, to prepare Fleming for possible entry into the Foreign Office, his mother sent him to the Tennerhof in Kitzbühel, Austria, a small private school run by the Adlerian disciple and former British spy Ernan Forbes Dennis and his novelist wife, Phyllis Bottome.
After improving his language skills there, he studied at Munich University and the University of Geneva. While in Geneva, Fleming began a romance with Monique Panchaud de Bottens and the couple were engaged in 1931, his mother made him break off the relationship. He failed the examinations, his mother again intervened in his affairs, lobbying Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters News Agency, in October 1931 he was given a position as a sub-editor and journalist for the company. In 1933 Fleming spent time in Moscow, where he covered the Stalinist show trial of six engineers from the British company Metropolitan-Vickers. While there he applied for an interview with Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, was amazed to receive a signed note apologising for not being able to attend. Fleming bowed to family pressure in October 1933, went into banking with a position at the financiers Cull & Co. In 1935 he moved to Pitman on Bishopsgate as a stockbroker. Fleming was unsuccessful in both roles. Early in 1939 Fleming began an affair with Ann O'Neill (née Ch
