Maxwell Knight
James Bond was named after the author of Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936 -- a book that happened to be on Ian Fleming's desk back in 1953 when he began to write Casino Royale in 1953 while staying at Golden Eye, his villa in Jamaica. The character of Bond was modeled after the playboy-gambler-spy Dusan Popov whom Fleming had seen gamble in Portugal, placing a massive bet in order to get a rival to withdraw from the baccarat table -- the very set-up used as a plot device in Casino Royale.
"M" was also modeled on a real person -- the spymaster Maxwell Knight. Knight was not only an observer and tamer of men for the spy game, but also a skilled naturalist who lived in a house crowded with crows, parrots, foxes and finches. Knight had a particularly interesting relationship with a tame cuckoo by the name of Goo whom he wrote a very short book about.
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