The Spy We Loved

As one grows older, and learns to cherish the few things in life that lend themselves to absolute pleasure, the whole debate appears rather silly. There’s no point going into the ‘‘Connery versus Moore versus Brosnan’’ rigmarole. Bond is Bond: greater than the sum of his parts. If you like him, you like all his films. You don’t ask a disciple of Vishnu to choose among 10 incarnations.

This is a celebration of unadulterated adulation. It begins with the story of Ian Fleming, his wartime adventures and his Caribbean retreat, his liaisons (romantic, dangerous or both), his life and career, and how it all found place, in some Hitchcock-like cameo, in his iconic character’s CV.

The Bond buff is taken on an arresting journey into 007 trivia. You find out, for instance, that Monique Delacroix—Bond’s Swiss mother, killed, like his father, in a climbing accident when James was a boy—was inspired by Monique Panchaud de Bottomes, a Swiss girlfriend Fleming got engaged to but broke off from, after his mother threatened to disinherit him. He preferred the money, a cold, pragmatic decision 007 would have approved of.

The most rivetting chapter in the book is probably the one simply titled ‘‘Villains’’. Fleming felt, the book says, that ‘‘heroes are judged by the calibre of their adversaries’’.

Like just so many upper class Englishmen in the dazzling afternoon of Empire, Fleming was a polymath, a man of rare and diverse talents and opinions—and, by today’s aseptic, humourless standards, deliciously politically incorrect. His ‘‘uber-villains’’ were a cross between, well, Rupert Murdoch and Osama bin Laden: ‘‘megalomaniacs whose schemes of nothing less than world domination make them worthy opponents for Bond. They are all extraordinary: Mr Big is ‘probably the most powerful negro criminal in the world’, Dr No ‘one of the most remarkable men in the world’, Goldfinger ‘the richest man in England’, who is planning ‘one of the biggest conspiracies of all time’ in order to become the ‘richest man in the world’. Ernst Stavro Blofeld is already the ‘biggest crook in the world’, whose devious plans are ‘on a scale of a Caligula, of a Nero, of a Hitler, of any of the great enemies of mankind’.’’

Blofeld, incidentally, was named for Tom Blofeld, ‘‘a Norfolk farmer, chairman of the Country Gentleman’s Association, and… a contemporary of Fleming’s at Eton.’’ He was also the father of cricket’s Henry Blofeld.

From his women—find out how Honeychille Rider (Dr No) or Pussy Galore (Goldfinger) got their names—to his drink, his guns to his gadgets, this book is the Bond bible. It can be summed up best by the line it quotes from the Spectator’s review of Moonraker: ‘‘It’s all utterly disgraceful and highly enjoyable.’’ Go grab it.