In playful response to yesterday's piece, reader Donald Matheson writes:
"The Bond worlds have a curious number of connections with Irishness. There's Brosnan (and Connery's from not so far away across the water), Sidney Reilly, the pseudonym of the man reputedly the origin of the bond character, Kevin McClory, the Irish Bond film screenwriter, then there's your Q reference, then (according to Google) in From Russia with Love, there's a half-Irish psychotic out to kill Bond."
"What it probably means is that the old imperial Britain thrives best through cultural products like Bond. Britain and Ireland are most successfully entwined still in these images and values that hark back to some mystical time when guns and sex made the hero."
This has some merit. Clearly Flemming spent quality time with the old big house Unionist class for whom the figure of the wild and unpredictable Irishman must have been more real than fictional. And it's not the first creative re-interpretation of Bond mythology we've noted here on the Letter.
See Phil Murphy's Hidden Hand for a new political definition of Shaken or Stirred?
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