We are a nation of artists. In this new four-part series, actor Dulé Hill (Psych, The Wonder Years) leads a cross-country expedition in search of fellow actors, musicians, painters, and creatives who are pushing boundaries and shaping or reshaping culture. The journey begins in California, where he encounters an extraordinary deaf dancer, a senior-citizen cabaret, and the beginnings of an LGBTQ revolution in mariachi. Tuesday, April 23, at 9 p.m., PBS; check local listings.

by Nicholas Shakespeare

If you only know Ian Fleming as the creator of James Bond, you’re missing most of the story, said Marc Weingarten in the Los Angeles Times. When Fleming wrote his first 007 novel, at age 43, “he had already lived multiple lives: as a war reporter, book collector, stockbroker, merchant banker, and naval intelligence operative.” In fact, by the estimations of his newest biographer, this British scion of one of the wealthiest men in the world had been so much at the center of the action during the war against Hitler’s Germany that he helped create the organizational template for the U.S. agency that became the CIA. Though Fleming’s life has been chronicled before, Nicholas Shakespeare is “the first Fleming biographer to get his hands on just about everything Fleming wrote,” and the result is a book that’s “somehow both capacious and breathlessly entertaining.” 

“He was quite an interesting man, Ian Fleming,” said James Parker in The Atlantic. “Born into great wealth and great expectations,” this grandson of Britain’s top banker disgraced himself during his schoolboy years at Eton and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. But he found his footing in journalism before using his connections to land a job in naval intelligence in 1939, when he’d just entered his 30s. “These were his glory days,” because he spent World War II dreaming up ways to harvest Germany’s secrets, maintaining constant contact with Winston Churchill’s staff, and even overseeing two assault units. “Again and again, Shakespeare’s biography reminds us of what a tight little island Britain could be for those of its privileged class,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Churchill had written the obituary when Fleming’s father died. Fleming counted Noël Coward as a confidant and Roald Dahl as a romantic rival. Once you dive into Shakespeare’s 821-page doorstop, it’s “one of those books you can happily live in for weeks.” 

In Shakespeare’s hands, Fleming’s faithless 12-year marriage to an abominably selfish socialite is “as riveting a drama as any wartime escapade,” said Anna Mundow in The Wall Street Journal. It was while ruing his upcoming nuptials that Fleming knocked out Casino Royale, the first of 14 Bond novels and the foundation of an entertainment franchise that has long outlived him. Who was Ian Fleming, other than a heavy smoker who was dead by 56? The Fleming we meet in Shakespeare’s book comes across as “loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous.” In other words, he was an interesting bundle of contradictions.

The Nobel physicist who came up with the 'God particle'

Peter Higgs never sought accolades for predicting the particle that underpins the Standard Model of physics. While walking the Scottish Highlands in 1964, the British physicist had a profound insight into why matter exists: The universe, he thought, might be pervaded by an invisible field that drags on particles as they pass through it to give rise to mass. Such a field would have to generate its own particle, and the hunt for the Higgs boson — which would come to be known as the God particle — became an international obsession. Governments spent billions building particle accelerators big enough to generate one. When scientists finally confirmed the existence of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in 2012, Higgs, a famously shy and modest man who had assiduously avoided his growing fame, shed a public tear as he received a standing ovation. He then promptly boarded a flight home, limiting his celebration to a single can of beer. "It's very nice to be right sometimes," he said. 

Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to a BBC sound engineer and a housewife, Higgs gravitated toward physics while still in grammar school and studied at King's College London, earning a Ph.D. in 1954. He became a permanent lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1960 and got involved with Greenpeace and the campaign against nuclear weapons, where he met his wife. But he "dropped out of both when they grew too radical for his taste," said The New York Times. Instead, he turned his attention to the sticky problem of mass, grounding his theory in complicated mathematical equations, said The Telegraph (U.K.). As his boson became a media sensation, he "regularly pleaded with colleagues to stop" referring to it as the God particle, saying that as an atheist he found it inappropriate and in any case the joke was a poor one. 

"More interested in his work than fame," Higgs turned down a knighthood in 1999, said BBC.com (U.K.). In 2013, the Nobel committee spent more than an hour trying to reach him before giving up and making the announcement that he'd shared the prize in physics. Higgs had been incommunicado because he wanted to postpone the hoopla as long as possible. "It ruined my life," he said years later. "My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to work in isolation, and occasionally have a bright idea."