From Russia with Love
Overview
From Russia, with Love is the fifth novel in Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...

's James Bond series, first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

 on 8 April 1957. As with the first four books, From Russia, with Love was generally well received by the critics. The story was written at Fleming's Goldeneye estate
Goldeneye (estate)
Goldeneye was the name given by Ian Fleming to his estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica. He purchased the land next door to Golden Clouds estate and built his house on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a private beach. The original house was a modest structure consisting of three bedrooms and a swimming...

 in Jamaica in early 1956. By the time the book was published, he did not know whether he wanted to write another Bond book or not.

The story centres on a plot by SMERSH
SMERSH
SMERSH was the counter-intelligence agency in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially founded on April 14, 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin...

, the Soviet counterintelligence agency, to assassinate Bond in such a way as to discredit both him and his organisation, the Secret Service
Secret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...

.
Quotations

Red wine with fish... Well, that should have told me something.

 
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