California Literary Review

Ian Fleming’s novel plan to outwit the Nazis: A secret mission cooked up by Ian Fleming in September 1940, more than a decade before he created James Bond, appears as preposterous as any adventure that he devised for his fictional creation. Fleming, in his role as a naval intelligence officer in the Second World War, was the architect of Operation Ruthless, a daring scheme to seize a German codebook that may have inspired From Russia with Love. [Times]

Ancient world: Five out of 12 Roman skeletons uncovered in a group burial site near Cambridge were found to have a spinal deformity. Meanwhile, an examination of 4th century AD skeletons at a Cirencester cemetery has revealed that 80 per cent suffered from osteoarthritis (a painful condition that can cause deformity and virtual paralysis). Julius Caesar mentions almost casually that in a single incident during the civil war, four out of the six centurions in one cohort were blinded. We can tell a lot about a culture’s values by the language it uses. Neither the Greeks or the Romans had a word equivalent to ‘disabled’ but the term that they often use is ‘teras’ (for the Greeks) and ‘monstrum’ (for the Romans). [New Statesman]

The day the beer flowed again: Seventy years ago, legal beer returned to the U.S. and provided a spark of hope for a country in a depression. [LA Times]