Bond makes an exhibition of himself... once again

For Your Eyes Only, which opens tomorrow, shows to what extent the adventures of agent 007 were based on the life of his creator, Ian Fleming, in the writer's centenary year.

There are personal artefacts and intriguing revelations to beguile older Bond buffs and enough guns and gadgets — despite a distinct lack of Aston Martins — for the adolescently minded.

The early rooms convincingly show how Bond's world and attitudes grew out of Fleming's family life, his journalistic career and his wartime service. The author was born into money but did not inherit it.

He was a decent athlete at Eton, a failure at Sandhurst, was rejected for the Foreign Office and lived in the shadow of a father killed in the trenches and a polymathic older brother, Peter. This may explain his and Bond's chippy individualism. The assertion that Fleming's adored mother had a daughter by the painter Augustus John might also explain his attitude to women.

There are portraits, photographs, clothes, correspondence and even Fleming's father's uniform and grave-marker that back all this up, while avoiding the funereal creepiness that sometimes afflicts such displays.

Reporting overseas for Reuters — the exhibition includes a hand-signed note from Stalin, turning down an interview — and later for the Sunday Times — gave Fleming an appetite for travel and glamour.

Serving with naval intelligence, he found the model for M in his boss, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, and also cooked up counter-intelligence "plots" as half-baked as anything he would later put in his books. The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, was cranked out in a month in 1952 at his Jamaican holiday home Goldeneye, to forestall fears of his imminent marriage to Ann Rothermere.

The sight of Fleming's desk, chair and his furiously annotated manuscript brings this whirlwind of hackery to life.

What the exhibition shows best, though, is how Bond's literary adventures, though set during the Cold War, were rooted in ideas of derring-do and British supremacy that dated back to Forties wartime. They were overtaken in real life by the defections of Burgess, Philby and McLean, but Bond proved an unstoppably alluring cultural fantasy.

A display of cartoons, comic strips and international book jackets segues into paraphernalia from the films: Rosa Klebb's switchblade shoes, Scaramanga's golden gun, miscellaneous jet-packs and atom bombs, Sean Connery's overcoat from Dr No, and Daniel Craig's bloodied shirt from Casino Royale. There may be no full-size cars, but the War Museum has Little Nellie, the autogyro from You Only Live Twice and the replica DB5 pedal car given to Prince Andrew when he was six.

Since Fleming died of Bond-style overindulgence, aged 56, in 1964, when the movie franchise was in its infancy, this gives the exhibition a broken-backed feel but it is redeemed throughout by telling details.

Ken Adam's design drawings from his Bond films are stunning, the handwritten manuscript of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that Fleming wrote for his only child a poignant inclusion.

Best of all, I liked the revelation that the three gold bands around Bond's Morland cigarettes represented the rank he and Fleming shared — commander.