Kirjahaku

Sean Connery's personification of secret agent James Bond invigorated Britain and its cinema, allowing a cash-strapped, morale-sapped country in decline to fancy itself still a player on the world stage. But while Bond would make Connery the first actor to command a million dollar-plus fee, the man himself was forever pouring scorn on the fantasies audiences found it increasingly hard to separate him from.Spirited, argumentative and sardonically celebratory, Christopher Bray's Sean Connery is both a biography of a star and an investigation of what can happen to a man when the images he creates take over his life. And it's an analysis of what it means to be star-struck - a critical tribute to a secular icon who has shaped so many dreams. In this skillfully crafted biography, Christopher Bray challenges the assumptions and rumours prevelent in previous biographies with characteristic wit and skill. His previous book Michael Caine: A Class Act, was described by the Telegraph as 'an extremely enjoyable interpretation of a fascinating body of work.' Apart from his notable performances as James Bond in seven Bond films including Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, Sean Connery won an Oscar for The Untouchables and appeared in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Highlander and The Rock. He has also starred in The Man Who Would Be King, Murder on the Orient Express and Zardoz.

The author of this memoir thinks he walks the Camino alone until a clairvoyant hospitelera tells him there’s someone walking with him. She tells him it’s the son who killed himself 26 years earlier. The pilgrimage to Santiago then becomes a walk into a mirror: the farther they go into it together, the deeper they return. Their family’s bohemian past is laid unsparingly bare until, at journey’s end, at Finisterre, the transcendent purpose of the son’s return is revealed. In 2025 nearly half a million pilgrims from all over the world walked or cycled to Santiago. Their numbers grow year by year. A recent YouGov survey commissioned by the British Pilgrimage Trust found that nearly one in five adults in this country are considering making a pilgrimage of some kind. Why? Maybe the answer’s quite simple. Our hearts, in their wisdom, yearn for something the empire of spectacle can never give.