Yes. Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the author of the James Bond novels began his intelligence work during World War II, when he served as the director of Naval Intelligence in Britain.
After D Day, he was placed in charge of an assault unit that became known as Fleming’s Private Navy.
It obtained German code books and equipment as British troops moved through France.
Sir Philip Sidney suffered a mortal wound in The Battle of Zutphen in 1586. The author of Arcadia (1590) was fighting in the Netherlands against the Spanish. He was shot in the thigh after lending his leg armor to another soldier. He died of infection three weeks later, at the age of thirty-two.
The first poem of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge in what many consider the founding work of English romanticism is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
The title to the drug-induced stream-of-consciousness narrative Naked Lunch means a “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” and is repulsed by it. The title was suggested to the author William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac.
Orson Welles’s 1942 movie The Magnificent Ambersons was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Booth Tarkington. Tarkington also won a Pulitzer for the novel Alice Adams (1921).
Jeeves’s boss was Bertie Wooster, a young man-about-town in P. G. Wodehouse’s stories beginning with My Man Jeeves (1919). Jeeves was his valet.
The Latin translation of the Bible was written mostly by St. Jerome in 382-384 A.D. The term comes from Latin editio vulgata, “spread among the people.”