I was listening to the actor Alex Jennings reading the bit in Casino Royale – broadcast on the novel’s 70th birthday – when Bond’s naked balls are ruthlessly spanked with a carpet beater by the fraudster Le Chiffre, just as the rumour landed that Phoebe Waller-Bridge may direct a future 007 movie. Ha! Très PWB.
“It’s July and the summer sun shines down the coast and out to sea,” croons Jennings, taking us south of Le Touquet in Bond’s 4½ litre Bentley to drink Veuve Clicquot – 007 being the ultimate GQ snob. The story of James Bond is more than anything the story of consumer goods becoming available to people outside of aristocratic bohemia. Bond is not about Etruscan vases, he’s about high-end shampoo. Tie pins and posey cigarettes. He’s about 1953, class being enlarged and everything being on the cusp of attainability. The intersection of affordable and unaffordable. Basically, Ian Fleming invented Instagram.
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