Features

“But now the club head was going back, coming down, the left knee bent correctly in towards the ball, the left arm straight as a ramrod. Crack! The ball sailed off, a beautiful drive, as good as Goldfinger had hit, straight down the fairway. Bond’s heart sang. Got you, you bastard! Got you! Blithely Bond […]

Today sees the release of the new James Bond novel – Solo – by William Boyd. It is a special year for Bond books, as 2013 is the 60th Anniversary of the original publication of Casino Royale in 1953. I got the chance to go along to The Dorchester for the launch yesterday to hear […]

There has been much speculation about the precise location of and inspiration for the fictitious resort of Royale-les-Eaux, which features in two of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Casino Royale and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Casino Royale, the book that introduced Bond to the world, is deliberately or otherwise fairly obscure about Royale’s location. The […]

Last week the Daily Mail published a piece by Baz Bamigboye in which he claimed Bond 24 director Sam Mendes – along with Daniel Craig and producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli – liked Naomie Harris so much her character, Eve Moneypenny, would have a much larger role in Bond 24. Rather than being […]

When it comes to James Bond video games, the one that tends to stand out among gamers is Rare’s 1997 release for Nintendo, Goldeneye. One of the game’s fans, composer Rich Douglas, has recently released an album of many of the tracks from the original game and re-orchestrated them to sound like a modern Bond […]

Sean Connery so much loved The Bahamas when filming Thunderball that he decided to move there and still has a house at Lyford Cay. The territory, which until 1973 was part of the British Empire, is comprised of 700 islands of varying sizes and most of them uninhabited, spread over 650 miles from the east […]

With the exception of the UK there is probably no country with a stronger link to James Bond than Jamaica. Ian Fleming fell in love with the former British colony while attending a naval conference there during the Second World War and decided immediately to build a holiday home there when hostilities ended. Following the […]

Daniel Craig’s first James Bond film, Casino Royale, was released in 2006 to a hail of critical success and made good use of a variety of locations. Much of the film was shot in the Czech Republic, both at Barrandov Studios in Prague, as well as location work that included Prague, Karlovy Vary and Loket. […]

Dating as they do from the Cold War, the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming are inextricably linked to Russia, although 007 only visited the USSR late in the series. Following his ordeal against Blofield at the end of You Only Live Twice, 007 is suffering from amnesia and, triggered by the mention of Vladivostok […]

It was not until On Her Majesty’s Secret Service that Ian Fleming even hinted that James Bond had Scottish blood, but neither could we have guessed that he was half Swiss. These were things that were only confirmed at the end for You Only Live Twice, when his premature obituary was published in The Times, […]