In the week of Casino Royale’s 10th anniversary we take a look at how the 21st Bond film came into being and the introduction of Daniel Craig as 007. After Die Another Day (2002) there can have been few who believed that Pierce Brosnan wouldn’t return for a fifth outing as 007. Today the film is […]
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Hard as it is to believe, today marks the tenth anniversary of Casino Royale’s Leicester Square premiere. Here I revisit my experience of that day. The world premiere of any Bond film is a huge event. However, with a new actor playing 007 and a change in direction for the series, there was a huge […]
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Your chance to try Vespers made to the original recipe with genuine Kina Lillet before sitting down to a screening of Casino Royale. Ian Fleming specified Kina Lillet in his first James Bond novel for the drink, and the same recipe was specified by Bond in the 2006 film version. The problem is that Kina Lillet […]
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Ian Fleming joins Ernest Hemingway, JRR Tolkien, F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce as the five twentieth century authors whose first editions are most expensive. Casino Royale lies fourth in that list, after Joyce’s Ulysses ($460,500), Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ($300,000), Tolkien’s The Hobbit ($210,500) and ahead of Hemingway’s In Our Time ($25,000). Remember though that […]
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Last Friday Daniel Craig was interviewed onstage at the New Yorker Festival. In this segment posted on the New Yorker’s YouTube channel, Craig explains how he landed the role of James Bond back in 2005.
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Dynamite Entertainment is to release a comic book adaptation of Casino Royale in November. The comic is adapted from Ian Fleming’s first novel by Van Jensen and drawn by Matthew Southworth and will exist in a separate universe from the Warren Ellis-penned comics, also published by Dynamite. At the time of Dynamite announcing its Bond comics the company […]
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Beyond the great dosage of espionage, death and violence that conforms it, Casino Royale is essentially a love story, and not in the corny way of the word. Not in vain, one of the novel’s chapters (and the book’s tagline) was titled “A whisper of love, a whisper of hate”. And throughout the 2006 film […]
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Burt Kwouk, who appeared in Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice and the 1967 Casino Royale spoof, has died at the age of 85. Kwouk was born in Cheshire in 1930 but was brought up in Shanghai until he was 17 years old, when his Chinese parents returned to England. After completing his studies in the United States […]
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A new edition of Casino Royale, with illustrations by Fay Dalton, is to be published by the The Folio Society later this month. This lavish edition, with artwork by acclaimed illustrator Fay Dalton, and an introduction by Booker-Prize winning author John Banville, pays homage to the enormous success of Ian Fleming’s iconic novels. Illustrations © […]
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