Did James Bond Have a License to … Globalize?
Ian Fleming anticipated an interconnected world in which mega-corporations and nonstate actors posed a new threat, and turned 007 into the UK’s most enduring weapon of soft power.
Shaken not stirred.
Source: United Artists
“The name is Bond. James Bond.” It is one of the most famous catchphrases in the world, familiar in 50 languages. What a droll twist of fate it is, that while Britain’s importance in the world has shrunk immeasurably over the past 70 years, the soft-power influence of its most potent fictional export, the “licensed to kill” 007, has attained stupendous proportions.
This is one inescapable conclusion from a huge new biography of Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, written by veteran literary biographer Nicholas Shakespeare. (It was just published in the UK and will come to the US in March.) Ever since the first Bond book, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, intellectuals — including Fleming’s own wife — have derided them. Yet I would argue that the books have real quality; that the author was a remarkably gifted storyteller who deserved his global triumph, though he died too soon — aged only 56, in 1964 — to enjoy much of the cash from them.