You'd expect the architect of the world's most glamorous secret agent to be a suave, disciplined mastermind with a master plan. The reality shatters that expectation completely: Ian Fleming was an aimless underachiever who failed at nearly everything before engineering the ultimate icon of success.

This episode draws on declassified naval memos, 1950s literary essays, and biographies to trace how a desk-bound intelligence planner built a fantasy hero to compensate for his own insecurities and a declining British Empire. It's a story of privilege, failure, and a modern myth distilled from a single life.

• His string of failures at Eton, Sandhurst, the Foreign Office, and banking before finding his calling
• The Trout Memo and how his fly-fishing deception ideas became real Operation Mincemeat
• How a panicked, middle-age ...